In the centuries following the conquest of Granada in 1492, the Alhambra’s iconic Fountain of Lions underwent numerous changes. More than a hundred years ago, a process of restoring the object to its original appearance under Nasrid rule was initiated. The joint interpretation of archaeological findings and historical texts guided the process of writing and rewriting the early biography of an object whose physical form has gradually been reshaped according to these narratives. The present article focuses on a brief period in the complex history of the fountain—the decades surrounding the conquest of Granada—and revisits Islamic and Christian written testimonies, emphasizing their inherent limitations as documentary sources. By introducing a hitherto unknown Neo-Latin poem, the article calls into question the early biography of the Fountain of Lions as it has been narrated so far, thereby challenging recent modifications to the fountain.
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Cf. Enrique Nuere Matauco, “Sobre el pavimento del Patio de los Leones,” Cuadernos de la Alhambra 22 (1986): 87–94. See also below, nn. 32–34.
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91, at 67.
Grabar, Alhambra, 34, 124. For a more skeptical discussion of Grabar and Bargebuhr’s views, see Irwin, Alhambra, 127–29.
Grabar, Alhambra, 101. The inscriptions are edited in Emilio García Gómez, Poemas árabes en los muros y fuentes de la Alhambra (Madrid: Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islámicos en Madrid, 1985; 2nd ed., 1996).
Paula Valladar, Guía de Granada, 121–22. For the considerable number of publications on this inscription, see Cynthia Robinson, “Marginal Ornament: Poetics, Mimesis, and Devotion in the Palace of the Lions,” Muqarnas 25 (2008): 185–214, at 209–10, n. 21. Nineteenth-century scholars such as James Cavanah Murphy still assumed that the water entered the lions’ backs through the small columns that were removed in the twentieth century. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests that the water entered the lions through a hole in their rear paws. See Bermúdez Pareja, “La Fuente de los Leones,” 27. A pipe is still visible inside the fragmented sculpture of a lion kept at the Convento San Francisco in the Alhambra that is similar to the twelve found in the Court of Lions. See D. Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 211.
Quoted from Grabar, Alhambra, 124–26. In the remaining part of the inscription, the (over-)flowing fountain is compared to the hand of the caliph who supports the lions of the Holy War.
Bermúdez Pareja, “La Fuente de los Leones,” 26. The author refers to a system described for the fountain of the Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fez, which was designed to keep a constant water level and was still operating in 1202.
See in particular Olga Bush, “‘When My Beholder Ponders’: Poetic Epigraphy in the Alhambra,” Artibus Asiae 66, no. 2 (2006): 55–67; and Olga Bush, “The Writing on the Wall: Reading the Decoration of the Alhambra,” Muqarnas 26 (2009): 119–47. For the aesthetic vocabulary of the poems of the Alhambra, see also José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, Aesthetics in Arabic Thought: From Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus, trans. Consuelo López-Morillas (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 827–44.
Cynthia Robinson, In Praise of Song: The Making of Courtly Culture in al-Andalus and Provence, 1005–1134 A.D. (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 48–87.
Quoted from Akiko Motoyoshi, “Poetry and Portraiture: A Double Portrait in an Arabic Panegyric by Ibn Zamrak,” Journal of Arabic Literature 30, no. 3 (1999): 199–226, at 205–13, lines 71–76.
Cf. Ingrid A. R. De Smet, “Poetic Genres – Occasional Poetry: Theory,” in Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World, ed. Philip Ford et al., 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 2:1144–46.
Cynthia Robinson, “Arthur in the Alhambra? Narrative and Nasrid Courtly Self-Fashioning in the Hall of Justice Ceiling Paintings,” Medieval Encounters 14, no. 2–3 (2008): 164–98. For the wider tradition, see Hester Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); as well as the contributions in Die poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken: Eine literarische Tradition der Großdichtung in Antike, Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Christine Ratkowitsch (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006); and Arwed Arnulf, Versus ad picturas: Studien zur Titulusdichtung als Quellengattung der Kunstgeschichte von der Antike bis zum Hochmittelalter (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1997).
See Briesemeister, “Humanistendichtungen,” 258. For the political dimension of Roman theater plays, see Hartmut Beyer, “Carlo and Marcellino Verardi’s Fernandus servatus and the Poem Supra casum Hispani regis by Petrus Martyr: Drama and Diplomacy in Papal Rome under Alexander VI,” in Drama, Performance and Debate: Theatre and Public Opinion in the Early Modern Period, ed. Jan Bloemendal, Peter G. F. Eversmann, and Elsa Strietman (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 35–56.
For examples, see Tabbaa, “Islamic Garden,” 323–26. For the general concept, see Rachel Arié, “Le merveilleux dans la littérature hispano-musulmane au bas moyen age,” in Rachel Arié, Etudes sur la civilisation de l’Espagne musulmane (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 239–57; see also the exhibition catalogue, Die Gärten des Islam, ed. Hermann Forkl (Stuttgart: Edition H. Mayer, 1993); and Jonas Lehrman, Earthly Paradise: Garden and Courtyard in Islam (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980).
See, e.g., Hill, Water-clocks, 13, 30, 44, 71, 85, 97, 100, 113.
See, e.g., al-Jazarī, Book of Knowledge, 26, 47, 51, 56, 75–82, 84–93.
Al-Makkarī, History, 1:82. For the Arabic original, see n. 65. Al-Maqqarī dates the destruction of the clocks to 1134–35. The conqueror of Toledo, Alfonso VI, reigned from 1065 to 1109. It thus remains unclear if the author refers to this king or a later one of the same name (cf. the notes to ibid., 385).
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In the centuries following the conquest of Granada in 1492, the Alhambra’s iconic Fountain of Lions underwent numerous changes. More than a hundred years ago, a process of restoring the object to its original appearance under Nasrid rule was initiated. The joint interpretation of archaeological findings and historical texts guided the process of writing and rewriting the early biography of an object whose physical form has gradually been reshaped according to these narratives. The present article focuses on a brief period in the complex history of the fountain—the decades surrounding the conquest of Granada—and revisits Islamic and Christian written testimonies, emphasizing their inherent limitations as documentary sources. By introducing a hitherto unknown Neo-Latin poem, the article calls into question the early biography of the Fountain of Lions as it has been narrated so far, thereby challenging recent modifications to the fountain.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 714 | 134 | 17 |
Full Text Views | 92 | 3 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 72 | 10 | 0 |