Capital

This stone capital is likely from a royal audience hall in the 10th-century Islamic palace-city of Madina al-Zahra’ located in southern Spain. The carving's overall structure, stylized acanthus leaf decoration, and bead-and-reel ornament are all based upon the Corinthian capital form favored centuries earlier throughout the imperial Roman world (roughly 1st through 4th century C.E.). But contemporary Spanish craft techniques—deep carving and extensive use of the drill—create a lacy web of leaves and stems resulting is an overall flattened pattern of light and dark. While such simplified imagery symbolically evokes the paradisiacal gardens described in Islamic holy texts and secular poetry, the stylized rendering of such plant motifs displays an enduring Islamic preference for two-dimensional patterning and non-figural abstractions derived from nature.