Inevitably, the evolution of the palatine city went hand in hand with that of the Nasrid kingdom. In the 14th century, coinciding with the prosperous reigns of Yusuf I and Muhammad V, the fortress reached its peak, including new palaces intended to demonstrate the greatness of their developers. In contrast, in the 15th century, the decline of the sultanate was reflected by a drop in construction activity. VERDICT: I haven’t used it much, but recognise its value and the role it plays in valuing & cataloguing surface pattern. There is no pattern instruction. It irks me that pattern is used so widely across the world, has its own layers of complexity and meaning but somehow is not always considered “Art” by a narrow European point of view. CONTENT: This is vast catalogue of patterns and their locations. It’s an entirely b&w book in Turkish. It’s structured systematically in each section by family of symmetry, 4,6,8,10 fold and so on. For each pattern you have a line drawing on the left, photograph on the right (where available) and below all the locations it can be found, usually in Turkey but for many in other places too. Some of the pattern illustrations are distorted and the quality of the print, paper and photos isn’t high quality. Even its purpose - palace or theological college - is not always clear. Its influence on art, and on literature, orientalist painting and Granada cinemas, Washington Irving and Borges, has been significant. Then there is Spanish Gothic of the 12th century and Renaissance influences even at Alhambra with the Palace of Charles V — the geometry of the circular courtyard within the rectangular building is so, so Renaissance.

VERDICT: I really enjoyed browsing through this book. The photos & illustrations really enrich the content. Then to have a documentary too is a win win situation! CONTENT: I have a second hand copy of this as published in the Dover Pictorial Archive Series. There are 190 b&w line drawings of patterns and 10 further plates with one or more b&w detailed drawings of patterns. There are dotted lines on my copy, which may help some to draw the pattern. Not sure that it does, however it does help you see the breakdown of the repeat unit. I hope you’ve enjoyed my guide to the Alhambra. You may enjoy these other Spain travel guides and resources: VERDICT: I’m such a fan of Manuel's books, and this is the best and most thorough! H is communication skills from a life time of teaching are brilliant. The photography, history, maps, diagrams, explainations that wrap around each pattern construction add to the brilliant richess of the book.a b Jones, Brian Jay. Washington Irving: An American Original. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008: 289. ISBN 978-1-55970-836-4 Legend of Prince Ahmed Al Kamel or The Pilgrim of Love has been adapted as the children’s picture book Prince of the Birds, written and illustrated by Amanda Hall in 2005. [16]

VERDICT: The actual books are stunning (thye seem to live on my desk catching the light!). The content is just wow. So well put together, the visual communication is brilliant; I know Serap is so good at this anyway, always making me see things in a different way, making connections between things I had seen separate. There are so many architectural photos I’ve not seen too. The story telling of the patterns, the step by steps, the different renderings of patterns and their variations, so very beautiful and comprehensive. The three volumes cover six, four, twelve, five and tenfold, so beautifully. I can’t wait to actually get drawing.Stalactites at first were structural elements — rows of small projecting corbels to fill in the upper corners of a square room to the circle required for a dome. But later stalactites were purely decorative — often of plaster or even, in Persia, of mirrored glass — and applied or hung to the actual hidden construction." — Professor Talbot Hamlin However the author doesn’t change or simplify or distort the Alhambra patterns. This is KEY! Islamic Geometric patterns look a certain way, each shape has certain angles, symmetries and proportions that means that they are correct individually, they are correct together as a fuller pattern and correct as a system to draw many patterns. ACQUIRED: I bought this from the Alhambra book shop in Granada in 2019. Another difficult one to acquire outside of Spain.