PREFACE TO NEW EDITION

The generous appreciation with which my larger book on the Alhambra was received by both the Press and the public in Spain and America, as well as in this country, encourages me to hope that the present volume will prove a popular addition to this Spanish Series. Three years ago, when I published The Alhambra to supply what my own experience taught me to be a real want, the scale and quality of the illustrations made it impossible to issue the work at a popular price. I am now enabled to present an inexpensive and, I trust, adequate souvenir of the fascinating city of Granada and its Red Palace. The text is no mere reprint of the matter which appeared in my former work, but embodies the results of a more critical, though not less appreciative, survey of the last monuments of the Spanish Moor. Bearing in mind, too, that the illustrations, being on a reduced scale, called for fuller explanation, I have endeavoured to condense as much detail and descriptive matter into the letterpress as the limits I had laid down for myself admitted. Those limits were still further encroached upon by the additional wealth of illustration which resulted from the decision to include the city of Granada in a work which, in previous issues, had been devoted entirely to the palace of the Alhambra, and the new pictorial matter so acquired threatened to annex all the space allotted for the text. But little as I liked the idea of further condensing the letterpress, I was even less inclined to neglect the opportunity of enhancing the pictorial value of the volume. In dealing with the Moorish art of Spain, I have always recognised that the popular want is for pictures rather than the printed word, and I venture to hope that the present volume, which surpasses its costlier predecessors in the number of the plates reproduced, will constitute a serviceable if not exhaustive guide to the beautiful Moorish capital, and an artistic remembrancer of its fascinating monuments.

I have to acknowledge my obligations to Mr. E. B. d’Auvergne for his kind and valuable assistance in the compilation of the text, and for permission to reproduce many of the additional photographs I am indebted to the courtesy of Don Senan y Gonzalez, of Herr Ernst Wasmuth of Berlin, publisher of Uhde’s Baudenkmaeler in Spanien und Portugal, and of Herr Eugen Twietmeyer of Leipzig, publisher of Junghandel’s Die Baukunst Spaniens.

As I have remarked in the preface to the volume on Cordova, it may be thought that in the present work I have given an excess of detail of Arabian decoration and ornament, but it has been my aim to provide the last word on Moorish art—so far at least as the pictorial representation of it is concerned—wherever I have dealt with it in Spain. To the general reader these reproductions of tracery and elaborate detail may seem superfluous, but they will, I trust, lend to the book an additional interest in the eyes of students and artists, for whose delectation they are included here.

A. F. C.