The Alhambra, Before and After

Professor Cammy Brothers, Northeastern University, specializes in Italian Renaissance, Mediterranean, and Spanish architecture and art. She is the author of two monographs, Michelangelo, Drawing and the Invention of Architecture (Yale University Press, 2008) and Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome (Princeton University Press, 2022) and the co-author (with Michael Waters) of the exhibition catalogue, Variety, Archeology and Ornament: Renaissance Architectural Prints from Column to Cornice (UVA Art Museum, 2011), as well as a frequent art critic for the Wall Street Journal. She is at work on her third book, Memory, Preservation, and Appropriation: The Contested Architectural Legacy of Islamic Spain.

The Alhambra in Granada, Spain, built by Nasrid rulers Muhammad I, Yusuf I and Muhammad V between c. 1238 and 1391, is the best-preserved palace in the Islamic world, and among the most famous. Yet its image is trapped in the mist of exoticism, suspended between Orientalist fantasies of Western travelers and Middle Eastern nostalgia for a lost empire. My talk will extricate it from this unhelpful matrix, attempting instead to place it within the context of a longer, shared Mediterranean history of the courtyard house, considering the important architectural ideas it embodies, and following its fate after Christian forces under Ferdinand and Isabella took over Granada in 1492. Their move into the palace was just the first of several occupations, most significantly that of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, who built his own palace abutting the site. The talk will consider both echoes of the Alhambra in other buildings, such as the Palacio del la Doncellas of Pedro I in Seville, and opposition to it, as seen in the Castillo de La Calahorra (c. 1509-12) and the Palace of Charles V (begun 1527).