Berber and Arab Architecture, 1906
From The Moors: A Comprehensive Description by Budgett Meakin, 1906.
From: 1906 C.E. To: 1906 C.E.
Location: Morocco
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From The Moors: A Comprehensive Description by Budgett Meakin, 1906.
Of Morocco it may be asserted without hesitation that there never was found here more inherent or latent art than there is at present, though there may have been in its history periods when successful monarchs, by subduing and exhausting its neighbours, have afforded scope for display, employing every available workman on their palaces and mosques and gate-ways, or in manufacturing articles of vertu such as were never in common use.
Early Ideals
Among existing monuments of ancient Moorish architecture, the sister towers of Marrakesh, Rabat and Seville, all erected about the year 1200, are at once the earliest and finest specimens of anything elaborate, but in the mosques of Cordova and Fez (the older parts of the Karûeeïn) are to be found examples of the original mosques of Islam, as also in those of Kaïrwan and Old Cairo.
It is the primitive "horse-shoe" arch in an undecorated wall, resting on plain, square pillars, as is still retained in the Moorish type, for in Morocco there has never been that elaboration which prevailed in Spain towards the close of the Moorish epoch.
Origin of Arch
What the origin of this most elegant arch may have been it is of course impossible to say with certainty, but no one wearing the hooded cloak of the country and facing the wind could fail to be struck by the precision with which the arch misnamed the "horse-shoe" is outlined before him, and it is a curious fact that no amount of setting out by the established rules for drawing curves is successful in producing it.
The native architect, who is still as successful as ever in obtaining the correct curve and proportions, does so entirely by eye, and the constantly present ideal which this requires is not far to seek. The result is that no two arches nominally of the same size coincide exactly, and that the two halves of the same arch are seldom identical. An ingenious writer has surmised that the tracery on the Hasan Tower at Rabat was inspired by the forms in which the coloured sands of the Sebû are thrown by the Atlantic waves.
Stone Epoch
The period of these three sister towers, and of the building of Rabat would appear to have been unique in the employment of carved panel stone-work, such as decorates the faces of the towers, and those of several gate-ways in Rabat and among the neighbouring ruins of Sheila, Most of these are built, as well as faced, with stone, a style quite foreign to Moorish art proper, and accounted for by the thousands of Spanish captives who were set to work on them.
Foreign Influence
The designs, indeed, are arabesque, but it is probable that the details were the work of foreign artists, confined to the style already set. The koranic prohibition of the portrayal of animal life is sufficient in itself to account for the development of a high class of geometrical designs, and it is evident that their elaboration is almost Influence entirely due to foreign influence, under which the chaste severity which marks the earlier examples and gives them their value is entirely lost amid an overwhelming minuteness of detail.
The marble pillars introduced even in the earlier examples are always foreign or imitations of such, and when sugar was grown in Morocco we read that it was exchanged weight for weight against Italian marble. The huge sectional columns of the unfinished Hasan mosque at Rabat have nothing Moorish about them.
Tile-work
A much more distinctively Moorish work is the facing of glazed tiles or large mosaics still employed in palaces and residences, as also in mosques, shrines. fountains and sometimes on gateways, as on the beautiful specimen at Mequinez, that of Mansur el Alj, built in 1732. This is by no means a lost art, and only requires the encouragement of demand to revive. The colours are good; blue, black, white, green and yellow, and another artistic green is used for the glazed tiles of saint-shrine and mosque roofs. The warmer tints of the ceilings and wood-work need the softening hand of time to lend them beauty, but the designs, although not numerous, are good, and the effect is usually heightened by a little carving-out of certain portions.
Colourings
Between the tile-work of the dado and the cornice of the ceiling nothing but pure white is permitted, yet in the Alhambra the Spaniards have attempted to improve on this, and their misconceptions led away even Sir Inigo Jones, whose beautiful copies of Moorish wall designs are altogether marred by being fancifully coloured, whence the misleading nature of all attempted reproductions of the Alhambra, such as that at the Crystal Palace, which have his work as their pattern. It is true that ignorant and ruthless Moorish servants cover much of the most beautiful work with white-wash, often till even the outline of the incised pattern is obliterated, so that beneath the rough and scaling surface of many an old Moorish wall there lurks unsuspected delicate tile-work, and marble columns are often similarly disguised. In the blending of colour the Moors show remarkable taste, a striking contrast to their Jewish neighbours, by whom gaudiness and brightness are more appreciated.
Meakin, Budgett. The Moors: A Comprehensive Description. Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1906.
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