Spotlighting Islamic Spain Through NYU's Library Collections

To complement ISAW’s new exhibition “Madinat al-Zahra: The Radiant Capital of Islamic Spain,” NYU museum studies interns Mina Turunc and Madeline Baird worked with ISAW curatorial assistant Carl Walsh and Librarian for Collections and Services Gabriel Mckee to design, write, and install two vitrine cases that explored the history of Islamic Spain through NYU Library collections and other media. These vitrines are located on the second floor at ISAW and can be viewed by the general public during ISAW public lectures and events.

The first vitrine focuses on how Madinat al-Zahra became a legendary lost city. Because the city was only in use for about seventy years, was partially destroyed, and never reoccupied, it quickly became buried and overgrown, a ruin that was known to local communities but whose nature had been forgotten. It was generally referred to as “Old Cordoba” and thought to be another Roman ruin in the landscape. While the true identity of the city was lost, the memory of its splendor was kept alive through fabulous tales and historical accounts. Many of these tales were rather fanciful, such as stories of glistening pools of quicksilver in the palace as told in Spanish writer José Antonio Conde’s History of the Dominion of the Arabs in Spain (1854). But they contained elements of truth, as the remains of intricate fountains made from Roman sarcophagi and metal animal fountain spouts can be seen in the exhibition. The fame of the lost Madinat al-Zahra even led the University of Barcelona to commission Spanish artist Dionís Baixeras Verdaguer (1862–1943) to paint a scene of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III (891–961 CE) receiving a Byzantine embassy on the wall of Paranymph Hall in 1885, which can be seen as the central spread of the vitrine. Many attempts were made to locate the city, but it wasn’t until the ruins of “Old Cordoba” were explored by Ricardo Vélazquez Bosco in 1911—whose team is pictured in an archive photograph in the vitrine—that the lost Umayyad capital was finally found.

The second vitrine delves deeper into the reception of Spain’s Islamic past in the nineteenth century, at a time when scholars were translating the works of Islamic historians into Spanish. While previously Islamic caliphates had been positioned as foreign invaders disconnected from Spanish Catholic heritage, liberal scholars began examining the influences of the medieval Islamic period in contemporary society.  This in turn lead to an interest in the Islamic art and architecture of Andalusia by Western artists, writers, and travelers. Their gazes and voices were highly romanticized images of Islamic court culture as being exotic, luxurious, and beautiful, as can be seen in the tranquil painting of Edwin Lord Weeks’s A Court in the Alhambra in the Time of the Moors (1849) and the intricate patterns of embossed and foil cover of Jean Charles Davillier’s Spain (1876). These idyllic perspectives were also highly Orientalized, and some artists and writers clearly portrayed Spain’s Islamic past as a time of violence, invasion, despotism, and barbarism, as can be seen in the gruesome scene depicted in the French painter Henri Regnault’s Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (1870). Modern scholars have helped to critique such Orientalist perspectives through continued excavation and study of texts, art, and objects, and some of the results of this work can be explored through the new ISAW exhibition.