A wonderfully irritable monograph, which is motivated primarily by Robert Irwin's annoyance over how other writers of poetry, fiction and guidebooks have treated the Alhambra: as a grand Romantic symbol, the pretext for a lot of ubi sunt wistfulness, and the setting of innumerable historical factoids whose veracity is questionable. Irwin brushes away ninety percent of Alhambra writers as

intellectually lazy, romantic hacks, who were so bound up by cliché and possessed by the picturesque that they were blind to the realities of the land they pretended to write about.

This is quite some put-down coming from the author of [book:Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh|1254880], which is pure Orientalist fantasy! The furthest Irwin will concede, when retailing some guidebook explanation of the site, is to say, ‘Well, it is possible, I suppose,’ or some variant thereof. Instead, he is at pains to stress our near-total lack of knowledge on almost every aspect of the place, from its function to its inhabitants.

We are dealing not so much with a body of knowledge as with a body of wild guesses.

The Alhambra was the seat of a Muslim dynasty called the Nasrids, who ruled the kingdom of Granada. Most of it, as it exists today, was built in the mid-to-late fourteenth century, i.e. about a century before the final sultan, known in the west as Boabdil, sighed his famous ‘Moor's last sigh’ and handed the place over to Ferdinand and Isabella.

By this stage, the Reconquista had already long since won back surrounding parts of Spain to Christianity. Muslim Granada had been a tenuous construct for centuries, beset on all sides by its enemies; the Alhambra was never some kind of luxurious European Baghdad. Pretty as it is, it was built on the cheap: instead of marble or even much stone, most of its effects are faked up from tilework and stucco (though to quite stupendous effect).

Beyond this, though, virtually nothing is known for sure. Most of the names with which the various parts of the Alhambra are now labelled are modern inventions, and the stories associated with them tend to be fanciful when they are not outright fictional. Studying the buildings for clues is made difficult by previous restoration work, a lot of which was rather destructive. One restorer added Persian domes to some of the buildings (since removed), while another, or perhaps it was the same one, understood no Arabic and rearranged the sculpted verses on some walls according to his own aesthetic ideals, so that it's now impossible to work out what they should have said.

My Arabic is not what it was (and it was rubbish), but I understand the script well enough, and it does add a layer of interest to have so much reading material available on every surface. The calligraphy – mostly in the style known as Kufic – is extremely beautiful, and when I was there the walls often held my interest more than the wider vistas of courtyards and pools, which were generally obstructed by shuffling tour groups clutching colour-coded umbrellas or huge blocky audioguides.

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The phrase above is found throughout the complex, interspersed with Koranic verses and poetry. It says wa laa ghalib ila Allah, or ‘There is no ghalib except Allah’ – though I had no idea until later what a ghalib was (it means ‘victor’, and the phrase was evidently the dynastic slogan of the Nasrids). Irwin is very good on the cultural disconnect symbolized by all this writing, which nowadays is pure ornamentation:

For the modern European or American visitor, the undeciphered squiggles of Arabic calligraphy add pleasing touches of decorative exoticism to the oriental palace. But in the Middle Ages the palaces were inhabited by people who could read the squiggles. Wherever they walked or sat they were instructed by inscriptions to fear God and cringe before the magnificence of their ruler.

Particularly valuable for me was the discussion of the mathematical principles behind the Alhambra's construction and decoration. Architecture and geometry were not, at the time, distinct disciplines, and Irwin examines research suggesting that ‘the grand design, as well as the detail of the court, was based on rectangles generated by square roots and surds’. In scientific as well as religious ways, the palace was ‘a machine for thinking in’.

Correctly viewed, the Alhambra, like many other Islamic monuments, is as much a masterpiece of mathematics as it is of art.

Though Irwin is sniffy about how the Alhambra has been culturally appropriated, it's a pretty fascinating story. In English it all began with Washington Irving's [book:Tales of the Alhambra|403733], while a parallel lineage in French literature goes back to Chateaubriand and to Victor Hugo's L'Alhambra ! L'Alhambra ! palais que les Génies / Ont doré comme un rêve etc. (though Irwin incorrectly gives the source of these lines as being ‘Les Djinns’; they're actually from another piece in Les Orientales called ‘Grenade’).

Visual artists have been equally inspired, mostly in the Orientalist mode which has since become unfashionable. But others took inspiration directly from the design. MC Escher, who visited twice, loved the tessellation effects but regretted the lack of figural elements; his own art would go on to combine the two strands in a fascinating way, and I'll find it impossible not to see his work in the light of the Alhambra now.

For most of these artists and writers, as for many tourists now, the Alhambra is more than its visual appeal. It's been and remains a kind of emblem of something that Europe has lost (wisdom, decadence, religious insight, high romance – it all depends on the eye of the beholder), and that is why it's been such a potent source of Gothic folklore, though this apparently makes things difficult for the historian. Irwin's tart and very readable overview is an excellent place to start getting to grips with it all, whatever your area of interest, and the notes on further reading should keep you busy for months. Take it along if you're visiting – odds are you'll want something to read in the queue. ( )

I picked up this short book because of my liking for the author's novels. My interest in the topic had no urgency whatsoever, and now I know far more than I'll ever need to about the best-preserved of medieval Muslim palaces. Although packaged as a something like a travel guide, Irwin's history of the Alhambra and its cultural reception has advice for the visitor confined to a three-page appendix. The bulk of the book is both conversational and erudite, treating the dubiety of received interpretations of the Alhambra, an assortment of informed speculations on the original designs and uses of the buildings, and tracings of the cultural effects of the Andalusian palace in Western literature and art.

Despite the extensive scholarship underlying Irwin's volume, it has neither footnotes nor endnotes. He does provide a very detailed bibliographic essay, complete with such blunt remarks as: "Chateaubriand's Les Aventures du dernier Abencerage was translated into English in the nineteenth century, though frankly it is not worth reading in any language." The twenty-five full-page black-and-white illustrations are a valuable complement to the text.