ABSTRACT
The European Enlightenment represented a turning point in the understanding of Islamic heritage. Spain also took part in the “rediscovery” of this heritage. Among other examples, Spanish intellectuals organised trips to copy Arabic inscriptions, and studied the language with greater focus. At a later stage, Islamic architecture drew renewed attention. Nevertheless, the peninsular Islamic past determined a specificity which resulted in a certain tension or even in some contradictions in terms of the interpretation (or not) of the Islamic heritage as part of Spanish culture. In the moment of the emergence of Spanish national consciousness, this tension led to a major debate that can be traced through the nascent historiography. It is precisely in this context that architecture – considered to be the expression in stone of the nation’s image – played an essential role. Therefore, this paper analyses the perception of peninsular Islamic architecture, specifically the Mosque of Córdoba, in connection with other Andalusian buildings during the Enlightenment. The discourse will be guided by the first texts on architecture and travellers’ accounts, which set the basis for our current historiography. Regarding the emblematic Mosque of Córdoba, this study will demonstrate that its memory was fully alive, especially after the Christian appropriation of its space in the sixteenth century. However, enlightened intellectuals as well as foreign travellers started to focus their attention on its Islamic forms, an attitude that exemplifies the coexistence of an exclusory view on the one hand, and an integrative one more open to the inclusion of Islamic heritage into Spanish culture on the other. The words and the silences of these intellectuals will be reconsidered in their specific context to show how, even though there was not a univocal vision on peninsular Islamic architecture, they opened the door to a later exaltation of Islamic forms.1
