1. The effect of mirrored columns intends to make the visitor feel _______________ and _______________ .
2. The designers could only use architectural forms as Islam bans the _______________.
3. Islam being a religion without hierarchy, the architects could create a feeling of _______________ in those who entered and prayed.
4. Abd ar-Rahman considered that what the palm tree had in common with him was his condition as _______________.
5. The Catholic cathedral was built by dismantling _______________ of the Mosque.
6. The Emperor Charles V realised it had been a mistake, even though he had _______________ himself.
7. The historian believes that the Catholic cathedral represents how one set of religious values was _______________.
The Art of Spain (part 1)
ReplyDeleteThe great Mosque is a forest of stone columns which seem to go on forever as far as the eye can see. The effect is a bit like being in a hall of mirrors, you actually feel lost in here, truly disorientated, and that’s the point. The worshipper feels in the presence of something mysterious and infinite, perhaps God Himself.
In Islam the direct representation of God or any living being is forbidden. The designers couldn’t use pictures or statues to inspire religious awe: just the forms of architecture itself. And the design of The Mosque is uniform throughout, so wherever you stand in this amazing, never-ending forest of stone you feel the same connection to God.
Early Islam was a religion without hierarchy, without clergy and liturgy, you just entered the space and prayed, so it was vital for the architects to create a building in which everyone felt equal: this is spiritually democratic architecture.
I found the experience of visiting the Great Mosque really powerful, I think it’s all the more moving when you think about the man who created it, Abd ar-Rahman. Now, we don’t know a great deal about him, but we do know that he left us one poem. It’s a poem about a palm tree that he found. That he seated himself somewhere out on the plains of Al-Andalus, and he saw it as a symbol of himself. He wrote a note to it: the palm, he said, was like me, it’s an exile, reminded him of his family. It was a very important symbol to any Arab living in Spain. It symbolised water, shelter, nourishment. Now of course that palm tree’s gone forever, but I wonder if this Mosque, with its endlessly repeated columns, isn’t a thousand palm trees planted here, preserved forever in stone.
But slap bang in the middle of the prayer hall is something profoundly un-Islamic… a Catholic cathedral.
In the 16th century, long after the fall of the Mosque, Cordoba’s Christian rulers demolished the central columns of the Mosque and erected this vast temple to Christianity. A cathedral planted in the centre of a Mosque is like a great parasite in its belly.
Even the great Catholic Emperor Charles V, who authorized the construction of the cathedral, realized he’d made a terrible mistake; and when it was complete he rounded on the architects, saying: you’ve taken something unique and turned it into something mundane.
I think you can still appreciate the beauty of the Mosque, but as an act of cultural vandalism I’ve never seen anything like it, it’s like a sort of dagger plunged into the heart of the Mosque. It represents a really heavy-handed imposition of one set of religious values on another, and there is something quite ugly about that.