The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (23 page)

Both the Almohads of Seville and the Nasrids of Granada traced their palaces back to the Madinat al-Zahra in Cordoba, which had been built by the caliphs of Al Andalus five hundred years before. Like the Alhambra, the Madinat al-Zahra was an airy complex of miradors and gardens, with marble columns supporting cusped arches. Here, in primitive form, were to be seen the geometric and vegetal ornaments whose lacy descendants were draped over the Alhambra’s walls. In the throne room of the Madinat al-Zahra there was a great bowl of quicksilver, which cast scintillating reflections around the room when its surface was disturbed by the hand of the caliph. Ibn Zamrak may have had it in mind when he composed his inscriptions about the stellar vaults and the crystalline fountains of the Alhambra.

And the Madinat al-Zahra herself was the magnificent daughter of magnificent mothers, for the dynasty that built it was descended from the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus, who had established Islam in Al Andalus in the eighth century. Each of the Umayyad princes built himself a palace more magnificent than the last, with courtyards and cloisters and fountains, domed halls and fretted screens and perfumed gardens. In veiled throne rooms suspended below the vault of heaven the princes reclined on their royal divans, as one day Abu Abdallah Muhammad would do in the Court of Gold.

These Umayyad palaces spawned not only the Madinat al-Zahra and its ultimate descendant, the Alhambra, but also the Fatimid palaces of Cairo, the caliphal palaces of Baghdad and Persia, and the Red Forts of Mogul India. “The Tale of the King’s Son and the She-Ghoul” in
The Arabian Nights
tells of a royal residence that calls to mind nothing so much as the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra.

The palace was furnished with silk carpets and hung with drapes . . . In the middle there stood a spacious courtyard, surrounded by four adjoining recessed courts facing one another. In the centre stood a fountain, on top of which crouched four lions in red gold, spouting water from their mouths in droplets that looked like gems and pearls.

But the line of descent goes back much farther than that. In the days of the prophet Muhammad himself, the ambassadors of the Arabs went to Constantinople. They brought home stories of a throne room guarded by lions and gryphons in which stood trees filled with birds, all made of gold, which all sprang to life and tweeted and roared as the ambassadors approached the imperial presence. The throne itself, they said, could be raised and lowered at will, so that the emperor seemed to appear and disappear in a cloud of smoke. His Sacred Palace was an endless labyrinth of courtyards and vaulted chambers, more of a city than a residence; only perfumers, they said, were permitted to ply their trade in its vicinity, so that no foul smells would assault the imperial nose. In a colonnaded belvedere looking out over the palace gardens a fountain spouted fruit juices, while in another one water issued from the mouths of brass lions and filled a nymphaeum with mysterious echoes. The walls were embroidered in silk, carved in marble, and tessellated with golden mosaic that looked like sprouting, abundant vegetation.

The Sacred Palace of Constantinople, in turn, was heir to the Golden House of Nero, in which the emperor would dine with his court, reclining on couches beneath a dome, as slaves poured rose petals down upon them and perfumed air rose through hidden grilles in the floor. It was the descendant of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, a fantastic landscape of courtyards and porticos and baths whose vaults were pierced with crystal stars; there was a vast niche where Hadrian would dine, reclining by a colonnaded lake, while food and wine were floated to him down marble rills. And it was the heir above all of the Palatine, a natural hill which, by the end of antiquity, had been carved, extended, and remodeled into a marble maze of atria, belvederes, vaulted galleries, hippodromes, and swimming pools, whose full extent is still unknown.

The first emperor Augustus also lived on the Palatine, but as a mere primus inter pares he dwelled in much more modest style. The house of Augustus was entered, like the Alhambra, through a simple door in a blank wall, which led to an atrium containing a small pool of water that reflected the sky. In the morning the emperor would sit in the atrium on his low chair in order to receive his clients and suppliants. He was framed by the columns of the peristyle behind him: an enclosed garden surrounded by a cloister. In the evening Augustus would dine dressed in loose robes, reclining, like his Muslim successors, on couches and divans. Augustus’s house was just one among many on the Palatine, which in those days was merely an aristocratic district of Rome, but it was the germ of its imperial successors. From the name of the hill on which it stood we derive the very name and the very idea of
palace
.

One can still discern, in the capitals of the slim columns of the Alhambra, echoes of the Corinthian acanthus and the Ionic scroll of classical architecture, and the pleasure domes of Nero and Hadrian are still present in the crystalline vaults that hang above every room in the Court of the Lions. In the ornament that covers every surface, the memories of Byzantium linger; and, above all, the courtyards and fountains that percolate a cooling breeze through the architecture are the scions of millennia of palaces. Thus was the classical world preserved and transformed, generation after generation, as palace succeeded palace around the Mediterranean, from Rome to Constantinople, to Damascus, and to Al Andalus.

The poets and courtiers of the Muslim world had been practicing the arts and the sciences of antiquity for centuries. It was in Muslim Syria and Egypt that astronomers and geometers had continued the studies begun in Alexandria long ago by Ptolemy and Euclid. Mehmet, the conqueror of Constantinople, had the exploits of Caesar and Alexander read to him every day to prepare him for the defeat of their enfeebled descendants. It was in Al Andalus that the philosophy of Aristotle was pored over by the famous Averroes of Cordoba, long before anyone in Western Europe had even read his works. The mosque of that city is a forest of classical columns taken from the Roman ruins that once covered the site, and its mihrab sparkles with mosaics donated by the emperor of Constantinople.

And because the artists and scientists of Islam had continued the classical tradition, it was as flexible and expressive in their hands, as delightful and useful, as it had ever been in Hadrian’s villa. It was still alive. Keiser Karel’s pretensions to Roman gravitas, on the other hand, had been derived by a different route, northward and westward: from the Visigoths, whose chieftain Alaric sacked Rome and went on to occupy Spain; from the Franks, whose chieftain Karel became Charlemagne and revived the title of emperor; from the Italian princelings and merchants of the Middle Ages. Keiser Karel’s classical palace was a theoretical exercise, self-conscious, like a bourgeois newcomer at an aristocratic party that has been going on for centuries. The construction of the Palacio Real began in 1533; and in the same year Abu Abdallah Muhammad, the last emir of Granada, exhaled his last sigh and died.

T
HE HEIR OF
Karel and Ysabel was named Philip, and when his father abdicated in 1556 he inherited his possessions in Spain and the Netherlands. Philip waited until Karel was dead before he called a halt to the construction of the new palace in Granada. The Palacio Real was still incomplete, a mask without a face behind it, and its vast windows and mighty gates led nowhere. The Moorish Alhambra likewise fell into decrepitude. The Court of Gold, inscribed once upon a time as the throne of Heaven, was inhabited by cattle; the miradors and the cloisters were walled up so that soldiers could barrack in them; the gardens became the habitation of thieves and beggars. Three hundred years later the troops of Napoleon tried to blow up the entire palace. Only in the later nineteenth century, when writers and artists were attracted by the exotic and the curious, was the palace of the Moors restored to an approximation of its ancient splendor. The Palacio Real of Keiser Karel remained roofless until 1967. It is now a museum.

Philip erected himself a new palace in the mountains of central Castile. The Escorial was a square block of stone, built in the form of the gridiron upon which Saint Lawrence had been martyred, crowned by high towers and encircled by blank walls of gray granite. From his small plain study in this austere fortress in the middle of nowhere, Philip governed the empire upon which the sun never set.

In the center of his palace Philip built a church surmounted by a great dome. Under this dome he gathered the bodies of all of his ancestors, so that the palace would be not only a residence but the mausoleum of his dynasty and proof of his titles. They are still there today, in room after room of marble sarcophagi: the underworld of the Escorial is a palace inhabited by dead infantas and princes, kings and queens. In the very center of them all he placed his father and his mother, Keiser Karel and Ysabel, who had conceived him in such a different place.

In Which a Scholar Translates a Temple

T
HE
A
NTIQUE
E
MBLEM OF A
F
AMOUS
M
AN
Matteo de’ Pasti, medal commemorating the construction
of the Temple of Rimini, 1450
.

The Parthenon was ruined in the explosion of 1687. Henceforward it was no longer a temple, a church, or a mosque, but an antiquity, one of the canonic masterpieces arrayed before the architect in his dream. Liberated from immediate use, it became the abstracted object of speculation. Scholars reconstructed the Parthenon in aquatints and copied it in plaster casts. They made it into the Platonic model of what architecture is and should be; and in doing so they ruined it further, for their adoration turned the stones of the Parthenon into Art to be placed on remote pedestals in museums. The past that the learned sought to preserve and understand disappeared before their very eyes.

The Renaissance, as its name suggests, proposed the rebirth of the arts of antiquity. But a revived civilization is not the same as a living one that has continuously grown, slowly and incrementally. The resurrected Latin of the humanist scholars of the Renaissance was hedged about with rigid grammar and syntax. Its rhetoric was a studied affair of form.

The architects of the Renaissance invented an architecture equally rigidly classified and cataloged, and architects and writers alike struggled with the problem of expressing their own living culture in the terms of the dead languages they had exhumed. How was it possible, for instance, to discuss concepts that the Greeks and Romans had never considered? How was it possible to design churches, for example, using an architectural grammar that preceded the existence of Christianity? The architects of the Renaissance were often forced to deal with the buildings of the recent past: monasteries, castles, and
churches that dated from what they regretfully imagined to have been the long sleep of civilization since antiquity. Just like their humanist counterparts, they attempted to translate these recent structures into the classical language they had revived and invented.

The “Famous Temple of Rimini” is one of the earliest examples of such an academic approach to the architecture of antiquity. It may be viewed as the translation of a building made in one language into another. But all languages contain some ideas that cannot be fully translated, and the Famous Temple of Rimini is now neither a church nor a temple but a curious hybrid. It represents not a union of Renaissance culture and the antique, the present and the past, but the unbridgeable gap that divides the architect atop his column from the splendors he surveys.