Stealing from the Saracens by Diana Darke

Author:Diana Darke
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In this bold sixteenth-century portrait of Henry VIII, after Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting, the macho monarch is standing on an Islamic Turkish carpet depicting a geometric star. The border of his cloak carries the Islamic ‘knot’ pattern, as does the curtain backdrop.

It is something which classical architecture rarely attempts, but many Western Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo artists have been inspired by Islamic geometric patterns. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) revealed his fascination with arabesques in his drawings and is known to have spent long periods analysing the complicated patterns. Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) used geometric patterns, as did Raphael (1483–1520). Italian painters of the sixteenth century called these patterns rabeschi, and in Hans Holbein the Younger’s bold iconic painting (1536–7) of Henry VIII, legs astride, the macho English monarch has the Islamic ‘knot’-style pattern on the border of his cloak, recurring in the curtain backdrop. He is standing on a Turkish carpet with a geometric Ushak star.

Even Andrea Palladio, widely considered one of the most influential architects in the history of Western architecture, showed in the groundplans and facades of buildings such as Il Redentore (the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Venice, 1577–92) the same grasp of fractal geometry and how it can emphasise the spirituality of a space. M.C. Escher, the twentieth-century Dutch graphic artist, spent many days sketching the tile patterns of the Alhambra in Granada when he visited in 1936, declaring afterwards that it ‘was the richest source of inspiration that I have ever tapped.’ An insight into how craftsmen used these patterns was discovered in Istanbul in 1986 in a 30-metre-long scroll, consisting of 114 individual geometric patterns for vaulting and wall decoration. Known as the Topkapı Scroll and today on display in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library, they are the Timurid/Turkmen-style architectural drawings of a master builder working under the Safavid dynasty in Persia in the early sixteenth century. Turkish Harvard scholar Gülru Necipoğlu published a detailed analysis of the drawings in 1992, in which she demonstrated how the plans were read by trained masons and transformed into solid architectural forms. She also sees a relationship between Timurid and Gothic architecture in terms of the numerate handling of materials.30

Muslim scientists and engineers translated, studied and developed Greek treatises, many of which focused on things like designs for the construction of fountains, including the mechanisms for creating different patterns of jets and sprays to determine the shape of the water emitted. The shapes were then extended and combined to make ever more elaborate water displays, with lead pipes used to circulate the water, and automatic opening and closing valves in each pipe, centuries before Europe used decorative water systems in the same way.

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