Reinventing the Alhambra

Picture postcards of the Alhambra were sufficient to inspire such composers as Manuel de Falla and Claude Debussy to commemorate it in music.

Learn more about Spain in International Living Postcards--your daily escape

Friday, Oct. 12, 2007

Modern science teaches that simple exposure to human observation can sometimes change an object's nature. Grand Tourists already know that access to many of the sites and treasures they currently visit is continually being curtailed for fear of the damage that exposure to humans can bring.

A glass screen now separates visitors from Michelangelo's Pietà in Saint Peter's after a lunatic attacked it with a hammer. To protect Leonardo da Vinci's restored fresco of The Last Supper in Milan against human body heat, the picture may only be viewed by small groups for 15 minutes at a time.

France has gone even further, closing the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux to public viewing forever and displaying a facsimile of the most famous remaining medieval illuminated manuscript, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, at the museum at Chantilly near Paris, because the original is deemed too fragile to be seen by any more humans.

But sometimes human intervention is beneficial. The last major addition to the Grand Tourists' circuit was actually the work of a single man in the early 19th century, who opened the world's eyes to the splendors of the only remaining medieval Moorish palace in Europe and, indeed, in most of the world--the Alhambra at Granada in southern Spain.

And it is in large measure the thoughts and feelings that the Alhambra inspired in this man over a century ago--anachronistic or plain wrong as they sometimes were--that still determine how it is seen by visitors today.

The man who put the Alhambra on the tourist map was none other than the romantic American writer, Washington Irving, who, in 1828 spent three months living in what had once been the palace of the Boabdil, the last Moorish Sultan of Granada, until he was driven out by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

It was Boabdil's departing sigh of regret as he glimpsed the earthly paradise he was leaving behind in Granada for the last time that inspired Salman Rushdie's novel "The Moor's Last Sigh."

When Irving first visited the Alhambra, it was just a forgotten ruin inhabited by peasants and their livestock. But Irving was a man of powerful imagination who had already published two successful fantasies about early Dutch settlers in New York State--The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle.

He realized that, for 700 years, the ruined Alhambra had been the beating heart of a great Arab kingdom and a place of unimaginable luxury and beauty. In 1831 he published his Tales of the Alhambra, an account of his stay there, but embellished with fantastical stories, largely invented by him, about life in the palace in Moorish days.

He wrote of princesses escaping from prison towers to ride away on their lovers' steeds, of cruel Sultans and treacherous deeds, of slender white arms beckoning from lattice windows, of sumptuous flowery gardens, splashing fountains, and a life of indolent, opulent ease.

The romantic picture he drew of the Alhambra was immensely popular, and soon a stream of artists, writers, and composers were rushing to celebrate the rediscovery of this lost Moorish paradise, though often without first-hand experience of the palaces and gardens they so readily praised.

Picture postcards of the Alhambra were sufficient to inspire such composers as Manuel de Falla and Claude Debussy to commemorate it in music. The French romantic writer, Châteaubriand, also made up stories about the region, while Victor Hugo turned it into verse. A fanciful reproduction of the Alhambra featured at London 's Great Exhibition of 1851 and a vogue developed for redecorating drawing rooms in Arabian style.

The name also became popular with theaters and cinemas because it suggested that rare and exotic delights awaited their patrons.

The Alhambra the Grand Tourist sees today is strongly influenced by Irving's original romantic vision as the Spanish authorities have been reluctant to interfere with his winning approach. It is essentially a place of oriental luxury and ease but with an undercurrent of treachery and intrigue.

The profusion of roses he found among the ruins lives on in the magnificent gardens of the Generalife, although the rose had not yet reached Boabdil's Granada. And its impressive fountains gushing 12 feet into the air are anachronistic, since Moors preferred the tumbling variety.

In Moorish times, too, much of the space taken up by today's fountains and bowers would have been reserved as pasturage for horses and for the Sultan's kitchen gardens.

The sense of tranquility these gardens give the present day Alhambra is also misleading. Red Death, as the Arabs called murder, stalked the Alhambra's corridors. Most Sultans and their Viziers met violent ends at the hands of scheming relatives and nobles here.

Irving's inventive imagination still haunts many of the Alhambra's richly decorated halls. His tale of how Boabdil's father murdered the whole Abencerrage family after entertaining them to dinner has led to one room being named the Hall of the Abencerrages, because Irving thought a red flaw in its marble fountain looked like a blood stain.

For modern visitors as well as for Irving, the Alhambra's most famous room, the Court of the Lions with its fountain supported by 12 stone lions, was part of the Sultan's private quarters where he and his harem luxuriated. But modern scholars think it may have been a madrassa, or Islamic school, and that the stone lions could be of Jewish origin.

The truth is, of course, that a certain amount of imagination is needed to make anything of the palace Irving revealed to the world. For we know next to nothing about life in the Alhambra in Moorish times because the Christians made a bonfire of all their books and records once they took control of Granada.

Irving himself readily acknowledged this, writing at the conclusion of his book "thus ended one of the pleasantest dreams of a life, which the reader may perhaps think has been too much made up of dreams." Indeed. But they lasted.

Paul Lewis
For International Living

Editor's note: Paul Lewis writes for The Owl, a unique free guide to cultural travel, from Classical Greece to Renaissance Italy. Become a reader here.

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