Alhambras de papeltraducciones y proyecciones a través de los viajeros anglosajones del siglo xix

Abstract

Abstract In every dimension, travelling generates exchange, either financial, political, or social, acting as well as a cultural transmitter and accountable for the landmarks or regional projections established in travellers¿ home countries. From this main tenet, and considering travelling as the main driver for this thesis, the building of the Alhambra as a part of the nineteenth century British imaginary will be explained. Those images would mark several subsequent generations and persist nowadays. Travellers extrapolated the reality perceived in certain areas to the whole of Andalusia or Spain, which triggered the ideal realisation of a dream rooted in the collective memory in the UK. Our aim is to prove that arts were not immune to this influence. The interest for Orientalism, with its roots in the previous century, played an important role in the extension of wanderlust. Both the Anglo-Saxon Romanticism, a model for the European cultural revolution, and the Industrial Revolution itself influenced significantly in the way the Alhambra is conveyed, perceived and transformed in the British Islands. This paper aims to show the interrelationship between these two phenomena using the theory of translation as metaphor for the construction of the idea of the Alhambra. The architect Matthew Digby Wyatt was chosen as an example where both phenomena, travelling and passion for the Alhambra, converged, and from his extensive work, the Moorish Billiard Room in Kensington Palace Gardens, 12, was selected as a particular case study. That room epitomises the culmination in the interrelationship between travelling in the nineteenth century and the reinterpretation of the Alhambra. This phenomenon spanned over a century and swung back and forth from the factual architectural structures to the daydream of the East fantasy.