Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (review)

234 Reviews were often decorated on the outside with masonry patterns. In Constantinople these were conservative, whereas in Greece bands of dogstooth bricks and other ornamental patterns enlivened exterior walls. Middle and Late Byzantine domes were much smaller than that at Justinian's Hagia Sophia (under 7.00m., as opposed to 31.2m. in diameter). The use ofsquinches, rather than pendentives, helped to secure the later domes, which were sometimes built without centering. Sometimes there were supportingribs,or segments, as in 'pumpkin domes'. Lighter materials were often used, including amphorae. Both builders and artists helped to create a decorated interior adorned with marble revetment, mosaic and fresco. It is not clear whether the decoration was planned at the beginning of the project. Sometimes artists used the builders' scaffolding to decorate the upper reaches of a new church. Ousterhout believes the subjects of frescoes and mosaics were chosen in response to traditional schemes, such as the Twelve Feast Cycle, as well as to other more immediate needs, which would argue for some flexibility of choice. The volume is beautifully illustrated with clear photographs and informative architectural drawings. There is an up-to-date bibliography. With his extensive knowledge of Byzantine structures in Constantinople and beyond, Ousterhout has written authoritatively about an important and often neglected aspect ofByzantine architecture. Joan Barclay Lloyd School of Historical and European Studies La Trobe University Ruggles, D. Fairchild Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islam Spain, University Park, Pennsylvania, Penn State University Press, 2000, cloth; pp. xvi, 275; 12 colour plates, 119 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$65.00; ISBN 0271018518. Dr Ruggles has two main aims. First, she wants to attack an old historiograp assumption that Muslim garden-plans from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries exemplified a universal type - 'the' Islamic paradise-garden. Secondly, she argues that w e have been misled here by reading back the significance of Islamic Spain's best-known garden - the late fourteenth-century Alhambra - onto earlier periods. She proposes a new interpretation; that the Alhambra was not an outstanding exemplar of paradise gardens, but a nostalgic recreation of lost political power. Reviews 235 Its builders drew on well-established repertoires ofarchitectural and horticultural motifs, but used them in ways specific to a political climate disastrously transformed from that which produced thefirstidyllic palace-gardens. The Alhambra's self-conscious elision of two originally separate ideas - the flourishing earth of this life, and the paradise of the world to come - was, she argues, very new in the fourteenth century. Ruggles certainly makes a convincing case; no mean achievement, since to place the Alhambra in its truer context she hasfirstto establish the architectural, agricultural, economic and political histories of Spain from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. Her success is rendered more remarkable by the fact that so few ofthe earlier palace sites survive, or have been archaeologically excavated. She has had to pursue information on even the comparatively well-preserved Madinat Al-Zahra through a web of fragmentary remnants, tendentious chronicles, travellers' tales and poetic allusions. Despite this, Ruggles shows beyond reasonable doubt that building luxurious and self-consciously 'rustic' estates around major cities was a pastime ofthe Islamic ruling classes ofAndalusia from the eighth century onwards. The gardens of these country-houses, or city-estates, stocked with exotic plants, and renderedflourishingby lavish irrigation, arguably symbolised both the wealth and status of princes, and their power literally to remake a whole landscape. Small wonder then that Madinat Al-Zahra, the largest and most brilliant early palace, was built in the tenth century, when Umayyad rulers at the height of their power were claiming to be independent Caliphs of Andalusia. Neither is it surprising that in the succeeding collapse of unitary government, rulers of smaller states, faced with substantial Christian conquests, sought both to reconstruct the monuments of a perceived golden past, and to reconfigure their symbolism away from reference to an unsatisfactory present life and towards the rewards of the just in heaven. So why, having read such a wide-ranging and plausible argument, should I feel dissatisfied? I think it is because the material which Ruggles presents is sorichand full of semiotic potential that to...