Islamesque
The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe's Medieval Monuments
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- £18.99
Publisher Description
Who really built Europe's finest Romanesque monuments? Abbots and bishops presiding over holy sites receive mentions aplenty throughout history, while their highly skilled creators remain anonymous. But the buildings speak for themselves.
In this groundbreaking book, Middle East cultural historian Diana Darke explores the evidence embedded in medieval monasteries, churches and castles across Europe, from Mont Saint-Michel and the Leaning Tower of Pisa to Durham Cathedral and the Basilica of Santiago de Compostela. Tracing the origins of key decorative and architectural innovations during this pre-Gothic period--acknowledged as the essential foundation of all future European construction styles--she sheds new light on the mystery masons, carpenters and sculptors behind these masterpieces.
Her discoveries are dramatic. At a time when Christendom lacked such expertise, Muslim craftsmen, with their advanced understanding of geometry and complex ornamentation styles, dominated the high-end construction industry in Islamic Spain, Sicily and North Africa, spreading their knowledge and techniques across Western Europe. Challenging Euro-centric assumptions about the continent's built heritage, Darke uncovers the profound influence of the Islamic world in 'Christian' Europe, and argues that 'Romanesque' architecture, a fiction first invented by nineteenth-century French art historians, should be recognised as what it truly is: Islamesque.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Darke (The Ottomans) offers a meticulous and piercing reassessment of the origins of the "Romanesque" style in medieval architecture. The Romanesque—long meant to evoke the revival of classical Roman traditions that brought an end to the Dark Ages and heralded the coming of the Renaissance—should more rightly be called Islamesque, according to Darke. Dismissing the theory of a Romanesque period as the product of 19th-century imperial powers' self-identifying with the Roman empire, Darke turns to contemporary scholarship, which has confirmed, she asserts, that "all the key innovations attributed to Romanesque—new vaulting techniques, the use of decorative frames... ornamental devices... and the use of fantastical beasts and foliage in sculpture—can be traced... eastwards." The "master craftsmen" responsible for these innovations were undeniably Muslims who settled in Europe and "brought... a multitude of design details," Darke writes. She follows the trails of these design details like clues in a detective story, beginning with the enigmatic zigzag patterns on her own house in Damascus, which she discovers replicated on Norman churches in England and France. As her narrative unfolds, the accumulation of such small details coheres into what feels like the uncovering of a historical conspiracy—Darke portrays a medieval Europe home to thriving Muslim communities that left a deep and lasting, but long overlooked, legacy. The result is a revelatory work of scholarship.
