The Arts of Intimacy

Resumen del libro

"I am sure the "Arts of Intimacy" was a labor of love for the authors, but for the reader this brilliantly conceived book opens a window onto a marvelous new vista of Muslim Spain. The Islamic political enterprise in al-Andalus collapsed in 1492, and the human survivors of that debacle were soon either expelled or expunged in baptismal fonts across Catholic Spain. Tourists now stand in admiration before the great monuments of once Spanish Islam, the solemn grandeur of the Cordoban Mezquita and the dazzling but ineffably sad rococo of the Alhambra, truly the Moors' last sigh in Spain. But in this happy collaboration of a photographer, an art historian and a "belle de letters," we are shown other Islamic monuments in Spain, often silent and unassuming ones, but more popular than the imperial mosque of Cordoba and certainly more essentially revealing than the studied curlicues of the Alhambra.
After they had rid themselves of the professed Muslims, the Spanish Christians began feverishly to scrub out even their faintest traces in their need to guarantee a true "limpieza de sangre. "How poorly they succeeded is documented in the "Arts of Intimacy. "There, hidden in plain sight in the cities and towns of Castile, are the local monuments of the Moorish style, the Western Islamic view of life and art that had worked its way deep into the fabric of Spanish sensibility. Both before and after 1492 Islamic decorative art and architecture continued to manifest itself, like flowers in mid-winter, in unlikely places across profoundly Catholic Castile and in the unexpected settings so magnificently portrayed and unpacked and understood in the dense but lucid pages of the "Arts of Intimacy. "LikeHer Catholic Majesty Isabella accepting the surrender of Muslim Granada arrayed quite unselfconsciously in her best Moorish apparel, the "Art of Intimacy "shows how Castile itself continued to adorn her public face in the gracious manner of the Moors and, indeed, in the end, thought it was her natural complexion."--F. E. Peters, New York University