page_title: Islamic influences on Western art
section_title: "Saracen style"
hierarchical_section_title: Islamic influences on Western art / Middle Ages / Architecture / "Saracen style"
caption_attribution_description: English: Liwan, or sanctuary area, of a mosque.
context_page_description: Islamic influences on Western art refers to the influence of Islamic art, the artistic production in the Islamic world from the 8th to the 19th century, on Christian art. During this period, the frontier between Christendom and the Islamic world varied a lot resulting in some cases in exchanges of populations and of corresponding art practices and techniques. Furthermore, the two civilizations had regular relationships through diplomacy and trade that facilitated cultural exchanges. Islamic art covers a wide variety of media including calligraphy, illustrated manuscripts, textiles, ceramics, metalwork and glass, and refers to the art of Muslim countries in the Near East, Islamic Spain, and Northern Africa, though by no means always Muslim artists or craftsmen. Glass production, for example, remained a Jewish speciality throughout the period, and Christian art, as in Coptic Egypt continued, especially during the earlier centuries, keeping some contacts with Europe.
context_section_description: Scholars of the 18–19th century, who generally preferred Classical art, disliked what they saw as the "disorder" of Gothic art and perceived similarities between Gothic and Islamic architecture. They often understated the case that Gothic art fully originated in the Islamic art of the Mosque, to the point of calling it "Saracenical". William John Hamilton commented on the Seljuks monuments in Konya: "The more I saw of this peculiar style, the more I became convinced that the Gothic was derived from it, with a certain mixture of Byzantine (...) the origin of this Gotho-Saracenic style may be traced to the manners and habits of the Saracens" The 18th-century English historian Thomas Warton summarized:
  "The marks which constitute the character of Gothic or Saracenical architecture, are, its numerous and prominent buttresses, its lofty spires and pinnacles, its large and ramified windows, its ornamental niches or canopies, its sculptured saints, the delicate lace-work of its fretted roofs, and the profusion of ornaments lavished indiscriminately over the whole building: but its peculiar distinguishing characteristics are, the small cluttered pillars and pointed arches, formed by the segments of two interfering circles"
  — Thomas Warton Essays on Gothic architecture
caption: The Liwan or Sanctuary of the Mosque of Ibn-Tuloon (1878)[N 2]
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