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CORDOBA 79
The vaulting is oppressively low—there is no head-
room at all. And if there are any additional spaces at
the sides, you accept them merely because the guide-
book tells you they are there; the guide-book figures
impress us, not the magnificence of the composition—
there is no sense of composition about the whole thing.
If you should cut away three-fourths of the whole
structure, or rebuild it four times its present size, you
would have secured a different area and a different
number of columns, without attaining any change in the
effect on the eye.
The Mosque in Cordoba, like all the other examples
of Moorish architecture in Spain, seems not the result
of a single great idea, but of a thousand isolated little
notions, each delightful in itself, all stitched together
like the squares of a patchwork quilt.
This lack of unity is apparent even from the outside
of the Moorish architectural monuments. Viewed
from without, the Alhambra seems an aggregation of
diminutive huts, half buried in the ground, with a gen-
eral air of planlessness—as if it had been gradually
added to, piece by piece. As a matter of fact, this
actually was the method in which the Moors built; the
Alhambra and the Alcazar were built room by room,
with no other connection between them than the door
which leads from one apartment to another.
The genius of the Moorish architects is most ap-
parent in their infinite wealth of detail, their inex-
haustible supply of decorative ideas. Their luxurious
imagination transformed the heavy walls of castles and
mosques into light fairy webs, and the rich and intricate
stucco which constitutes the walls and ceilings of the
halls of the Alhambra, the delicate pink on the sur-
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