The Beauty of the Power: Muqarnas, Sharing Art and Culture across the Mediterranean

Abstract

This paper aims to highlight the artistic exchanges between Sharq al-Andalus and elsewhere in the Mediterranean such as Ifrīqiya and Norman Sicily, through the analysis of the pictorial decoration used in the cells of muqarnas preserved in the Dār al-Ṣughrā in Murcia and on the ceiling of the central nave of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, works dating from the sixth/twelfth century. The paper defends the propagandistic nature of this decoration, because it uses motifs from the Abbasid painting of Samarra, dated in the third/ ninth century, inspired in turn by Sasanian motifs. The adoption of these motifs and the interest in recreating the spaces of the great Abbasid caliphs and even of the Sasanian kings embodies an act of official inauguration and of the acceptance of a Caliphal dignity lost by the Abbasid caliphs themselves, and recovered by these rulers of the sixth/twelfth century.