Colour, Design and Medieval Optics

Today the Alhambra appears mostly devoid of colour, but the recent work of conservators demonstrates that the interior spaces were vibrantly coloured in Nasrid times. This chapter takes up the much-neglected use of colour in stucco, wood, marble, glass and, above all, ceramic tiles, seeking to establish a new balance with geometry, heretofore the leading element in scholarship on design principles in the Alhambra. The first step is to distinguish between the colours in the Nasrid Alhambra and the work of nineteenth-century restoration, focusing on the baths in the Palace of Comares, often dismissed as an Orientalist fantasy. The second step is to consider medieval optics, exemplified by the eleventh-century scientific treatises of Ibn al-Haytham, as a source of design principles circulating within Nasrid culture. Ibn al-Haytham's account of the mental processes leading from perception to cognition, supported by the findings of contemporary neuroscience, illuminates the way that colour introduces a kinetic dimension into static geometric designs in such features as the muqarnas vaults in the Palace of the Lions and the dadoes of ceramic tile mosaics in the Palace of Comares.