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British Travellers and the Discovery of the Alhambra, 1760-1830
by Roey Sweet and Richard Ansell
The ‘discovery’ of the Alhambra in Granada, and by extension the architecture and history of Islamic Spain, is usually ascribed to the Romantic writers and artists of the 1820s and 1830s. Anglophone scholars rarely look at preceding decades, focusing instead on the lure of Italy, on the assumption that Spain had little to offer the traveller or man of taste. However, as this paper will show, British knowledge of Al-Andalus and its remains was of much longer standing. In the 1760s and 1770s, peace with Spain encouraged growing familiarity with the country reflected in published and unpublished journals of tours to Spain, in which Al Andalus and its ‘Moorish’ antiquities featured prominently. This was not a question of British ‘discovery’, however, as their encounters with the Alhambra drew heavily on Spanish scholarship at the court of Carlos III, which culminated in the Antigüedades árabes de España (1787, 1804). Counter-intuitively, the advent of war in the Iberian Peninsular increased the number of civilian travellers to Spain, including the topographer and antiquary William Gell FSA (1808-10) whose illustrated journal, held by the British School at Rome, demonstrates the possible depth of engagement with Islamic interiors, Arabic inscriptions and Spanish histories by this period. At home and in translation, British writers such as Gell acted as vectors for the spread of Andalusian culture throughout Europe.
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