Puerta Del Vino - Alhambra

Title:	*PUERTA DEL VINO - ALHAMBRA*
Medium:	Pencil mixed media on canvas
Size [w x h]:	Not recorded - enquire for details
Description:	The Alhambra is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, architecture beautiful in the extreme. The artist spent 3 wonderful weeks living inside the walls sketching in 1983, producing what he considers his best of all realistic impressions. The building remains from a period not often acknowledged or remembered by today's Christian societies, a period when Moslems were the most cultured and educated race of the period, and ruled all of Spain and North Africa. Their influence spread well up into France and across into Italy, where they taught those more primitive races advanced mathematics, art, music and chivalry, and a more gracious, generous way of being. They were ultimately defeated in 1492 after ruling and educating huge areas of southern Europe for nearly 1000 years, dethroned by the more primitive 'Christian crusader' hoards who came from northern Europe. All the kingships that had been thriving under the various generations of Moslem king's tolerant Moslem rule were slaughtered and pilfered, including Christian, Jewish and Moslem. In that period the Moslems produced beautiful poetry in praise of a gentle way of living such as Omar Kiam, and created the tradition of romance with the lady in the window being serenaded by a guitar-playing suitor are remnants of that gentler more tolerant earlier Moslem society (which founded universities and hospital systems before Cambridge and Oxford existed).

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