Il giardino islamico (review)

A renowned historian who has contributed to our knowledge and the preservation of many famous Italian gardens, Luigi Zangheri has moved beyond Italy in his latest book, a collaborative volume that trains his lens and our eyes on the gardens of the Islamic world. Il giardino islamico is an invaluable compendium of gardens and landscapes associated with the spread of Islam. The major deficiency is the reduction of much of the volume to a catalogue of the most significant gardens that reiterates the basis of almost every garden design in the earliest chahar bagh, or quadripartite, garden. This typological interpretation and presentation of the data is typical of many larger surveys of architecture and landscape architecture, but in this instance the opportunity to situate the gardens in their larger art historical and social context is effectively restricted to the introductory essay and to parts of Lorenzi's chapters on the Islamic gardens of Sicily and the first few pages of Rahmati's piece on the legacy of the Persian garden.

In any event, the lengthy list of gardens and the publication of their plans and a number of images makes this text a worthy addition to the libraries of scholars of Islamic art and architecture as well as of students of garden history. Zangheri's contributions to the history of Italian Renaissance garden design have helped a generation of readers interpret the iconography and features of Renaissance gardens and to develop a superior understanding of the motivations of early modern Italian patrons and designers in the construction of gardens and parks like Pratolino and the Boboli gardens. In this book Zangheri presents a solid introduction to the preferred design, plantings, and hydrology of the Islamic garden. His analysis relates these gardens to the climactic conditions and cultural leanings of the Arab, Persian, Berber, and Turkish Muslims who embraced the garden as a locus of relaxation that could be imbued with meaning. For Zangheri the Islamic garden was not only a luxurious retreat or cool complement to a palace, city, or residence but was also a space that could serve as a symbol of power relationships, and might reflect a patron's complete submission to the will of Allah; yet at the same moment these particular Islamic landscapes exhibit the absorption of other aesthetic traditions into the mainstream of Islamic culture.

Zangheri's coauthors similarly locate the reader in the Islamic world; and their contributions to the text identify the particular case of the garden in realms conquered by the Muslims as they extended their hegemony across the Mediterranean. The single most fascinating element of Brunella Lorenzi's essay is the convincing correlation between garden style and the architecture of pavilions and garden buildings in Norman Sicily with the adoption of Islamic behaviors by the Norman rulers of the island in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Unfortunately, once made and argued, Lorenzi's analysis of the Sicilian gardens begins to become repetitive and eventually overwhelms the reader, almost forcing the reader to question the purported relationship between garden style and government as a valid point that may be overstated. Similarly, the final section of the book supposes that the earliest walled gardens, or paradeisos, that were built at Pasargadae and other Achaemenid and Sassanian palaces, provided the source for the four-part gardens later developed as the major type for the Islamic and later Mughal gardens. This argument has been put forward on many occasions and appears justifiable based on the Arabic conquerors' willingness to adopt the forms of buildings and landscapes that they encountered as they spread their political and military dominance across the lands of the Roman, Byzantine, and Persian empires. Again, the author, Nausikaa Rahmati, makes a clear point, but the listing of and brief description of a large number of gardens in the chahar bagh type reduces this form to nothing more than a simple and readily manipulated geometric palette...