Fragments of door casing

This remarkable piece of work dates from the Almoravid era, and is one of the oldest examples of the art of Hispano-Maghrebian metalworking. These fragments come from the door to the Bāb al-Janā’iz funeral annexe of the Al-Qarawīyīn Mosque in Fez. The fragments are made up of a series of separate panels with engraved decorative motifs, on which are riveted strips in high relief. The ensemble formed a panel over a wooden door, held in place with large nails with gadrooned heads.

The upper panel is narrow and rectangular and contains a beautiful votive inscription in elegant Kufic script on a ground of very fine floral foliage. The ascenders of the letters terminate in hooks. The inscription, which is a common eulogy, says: ‘Everlasting joy and happiness’.

This band crowns a geometric composition made up of two overlapping octagonal compartments, each of which contains a cruciform motif decorated in its centre with a quadrilobate square standing on one corner, a composition which is often found on doors. Inside there are concentric circles whose centres are decorated with palmettes and foliage, bordered with two braided bands that gradually evolve into an epigraphic motif, where a cursive script declares: ‘Everlasting and total joy; bliss; bravery; happiness; power; support; victory’. The spandrels, or free spaces of this composition, and the lateral bands are decorated with cartouches, in which there are fine vegetal motifs of palmettes and foliage laid out along a symmetrical axis.

The ornamental vocabulary of this work attests to the many sources and influences that existed in the Ifriquian zone where the Almoravid art of bronze and wood, and the Ummayad art of Cordoba and the Reyes de Taifas played a major role. Among the floral motifs on this panel is the fleuron, whose shape would seem to point to the influence of Ayyubid Syria. Some floral motifs are local or Andalusian inventions, like the long and winding simple asymmetric palm leaf. The artisan has drawn on all the decorative styles of the eleventh century to create a pure and finely balanced composition, which attests to both its place of fabrication and its era.

The doors from the Al-Qarawīyīn Mosque—Bāb Janā’iz, Bāb Sbitrīyin, and Bāb al-Ward—are some of the most ancient with bronze panelling in the Maghrib and Andalusia. They are different from the rare Andalusian examples encountered, the oldest of which dates back to the Almohad era in the twelfth century. These pieces attest to the existence in Fez, during the Almoravid era, of a flourishing metalworking workshop, whose existence is confirmed by ancient texts. Ibn Said, the thirteenth-century Spanish Muslim writer who wrote about the Maghrib, tells us that in the Almoravid and Almohad eras, Andalusia imported copper and brass objects from Morocco. This tendency was inverted at the end of the thirteenth century, as can be seen in the style of fourteenth-century Moroccan objects that are clearly derived from Andalusian pieces. It was long believed that the first example of bronze door casing in the Islamic world were the doors of Cairo’s Salih Tala’i Mosque, dating from 1160, which means that the pre-dated Moroccan door casing has a major role to play in understanding the chronology of the art of metalworking.