This was a conquest that would not end until the last Muslim power was cast off of the European continent, a goal roughly accomplished by 1492, at the dawning of the Modern Era. From this perspective, the long period during which Islamic power flourished in the Iberian Peninsula is usually regarded in terms of the “Reconquista,” the 800 years during the Middle Ages when Spanish monarchs were committed to retaking the lands that they had claimed to be their own. To the latter, Andalusia’s Islamic rule was the result of an Eastern invasion of a land belonging to the West. The story of Andalusia reads very differently from an Eastern perspective than it does from a Western one. I became interested in how this concept of toleration could be read into the variety of built forms and histories of the Andalusian Islamic empires.

After visiting and delving deeper into the area’s rich history, the role of toleration took on more complex flavors.

Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Fifty Years, edited by Elizabeth Cropper (2002).The original intention of my project was to explore the concept of tolerance as it was represented through ornament and ornamentation in Andalusia, a region of Spain that was once under Islamic rule. For discussions of lectures and lecturers through 2001, see the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts publication The A. Since 1967 the series has been published by Princeton University Press. Endowed by a gift of the Old Dominion Foundation and the Avalon Foundation (creations of Paul Mellon and his sister, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, respectively) the lecture series was founded “to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” The lecturers were to be, and have been, of “exceptional ability, achievement and reputation.” The National Gallery engages distinguished scholars from all disciplines to lecture on subjects in their fields, as the original gift mandated, “provided such subjects have a relationship to or bearing on the Fine Arts or are important to understanding, appreciation, or promotion of the Fine Arts.” As publication was always an essential part of the vision of the Mellon Lectures, a relationship was established between the National Gallery and the Bollingen Foundation for a series of books based on the lectures. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were inaugurated in 1949.

The mediation of ornament