UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

In The Alhambra: Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards, the American writer and diplomat Washington Irving (1783–1859) conjured tantalizing images of the famous Islamic palace-fortress in Granada, renowned for its magnificent architecture and intricate ornament. The fictionalized scenes that Irving exported solidified ideas about Spain in the popular imagination, generating Orientalist fantasies of the “Moorish” past that had a lasting impact within Spain and abroad. The persistent question, how Islamic is Spain?, was asked by politicians, historians, travelers, and artists, and answered in diverse, often contradictory ways.

In a companion exhibition to the archaeologically focused The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples (also September 15, 2024­–January 5, 2025), Unearthing the Legacy of Islamic Spain explores how the Islamic monuments of the Iberian Peninsula—also being excavated after centuries of neglect—became powerful symbols of Spanish culture and identity. Drawing on the Meadows Museum’s permanent collection, SMU’s Bridwell and DeGolyer Libraries, and two local private collections, Unearthing the Legacy of Islamic Spain illuminates a moment of intense social and cultural change in Spain, when debates raged about national identity and modernization, which in turn yielded a cultural resurgence and renewed interest in Spain’s past, including its Islamic heritage.

Paintings, drawings, and printed material from the nineteenth century reflect diverse perspectives on Spain’s long history of Muslim rule, from the arrival of the Umayyads in the eighth century until the expulsion of the last Nasrid sultan in 1492. Anchoring the exhibition is one of the medieval treasures of the Meadows Museum: an ornate marble capital of the tenth century from the palace-city of Madinat al-Zahraʾ, near Córdoba. This architectural fragment embodies the medieval material that the nineteenth-century works responded to and together, these objects and images will highlight the tension between Spain’s medieval past and its modern interpretations.