We spent a good part of today exploring the Real Alcazar, here in Seville. This is the former royal palace, and it dates back to the Moorish period in Spanish history. Unlike “great houses” in the UK, no attempt has been made to furnish it as a residence, but it is none the less interesting for that.
The legacy of wonderful tiled walls, in the Islamic tradition, is imprressive in its unlimited inventiveness. The feature that really held my attention, however, was the gardens. These fall into two areas, and encapsulate two very different ways of looking at gardens. The earlier (Moorish) part of the palace sees the buildings as a kind of “containing frame” for the gardens and their fountains. Thie succession of garden-courts offer havens of peace within the structure. The tradition with which I am more familiar uses gardens as barriers on the outside of the building, and their primary purpose appears to be to emphasise the separateness of the inhabitants of the building from the common world beyond.
Walking through the Alcazar I was reminded of the difference between the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic traditions, both of which give important symbolic space to the garden. In the former tradition human life begins in a garden (Eden) from which we have been expelled. A garden represents what we have lost. In Islam life ends in a garden (Paradise).
I have always had difficulty with the Christian images of heaven, which George Orwell described as resembling “choir practice in a jeweller’s shop”. All those images of endless singing of “Hallelujah” convey nothing to which I might want to look forward. I have no difficulty, however, in imagining Paradise as a garden.
This trip has found me puzzling over several aspects of common religious imagery in art. The representations of holy personages, so common in churches in this part of the world, seem to me to be intended to stress the degree of their separateness from the world of human experience. They embody the same imagery as the traditional English country-house garden. The common people are to be held at a distance by the barrier of the deer-park.