Word: andalus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...taking bells from church spires and converting them into mosque lamps. The most impressive single work of sculpture in the show, the 11th century Pisa griffin, is so hybrid that without a context, scholars seem unable to decide where it comes from -- or even whether it is from al-Andalus at all. It may equally well be Egyptian, North African or Iranian, though the Pisans themselves (who installed it on the facade of their cathedral) believed it was war booty from their conquest of Majorca, once an Arab fiefdom. Severely holed by bullets in the 19th century, it remains...
...durable art of al-Andalus -- the Arabs' word for Spain between their initial conquest and their final expulsion -- was, of course, architecture. Of the 4,000 or so "castles in Spain" that still stand (military buildings of all kinds, from fortified palaces to watchtowers), fully a quarter were built by the Arabs. Several of their buildings, from the Alhambra, or "red castle," in Granada to the Great Mosque of Cordoba to the towering Giralda in Seville, are among the key works of world architecture...
...also deemed too fragile to travel. When the Spanish authorities refused to lend one of the spectacular amphora-type "Alhambra vases," with its luster glazes and formalized handles like angels' wings, another was lent by the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. But even in its truncated form, "Al-Andalus" is not an exhibition to miss...
...Arab scholars, without whose efforts we would know little or nothing of Aristotle. In science, Europe until the 14th century was illiterate compared with the Arab world, and a group of exquisitely made brass instruments in this show reminds one that the universal astrolabe was invented in al-Andalus around...
...forms of Roman antiquity dissolving into the Islamic taste for allover pattern; eaten away by deep carving, a recognizably Ionic capital turns into a web of exquisite stone lace, a sort of architectural counterpart to the deeply incised ivory caskets and pyxes favored by the courts of al-Andalus. One of the most impressive bowls in this show, a deep conical form bearing on its inside surface a design of a Portuguese nao, or trading ship, so powerful in its rhythms of hull and sail that the concavity of the dish seems almost to reverse itself under the visual pressure...