This presentation will revisit the heritage of Umayyad mosque architecture, which is as well-known as it is poorly understood in critical aesthetic terms. With their glittering gold mosaics, the spectacular ornamentations of the religious architecture built by the Umayyad Caliphs of Damascus (661-750), most relevantly for this conference of the relatively well-preserved Great Mosque in the Syrian capital, represent the first historical phase of Islamic visual aesthetics. These ornamentations observably bear the stylistic and technical marks of the region’s age-old art of Late Antiquity. Overall attached to traditional art history and seldom engaged in the critical inquiry, the scholarship perceives in this art a phenomenon of continuity and rupture with this pre-Islamic tradition, the obvious discontinuity consisting in the absence of living beings in the mosaics’ lifeless landscapes and cityscapes making of them novel Islamic artworks. On the other hand, it persists in seeking or finding in this aniconic decoration some kind of signified representation or symbolic content because it uncritically sees in the mosaics’ Hellenistic-Roman iconographic repertoire including buildings, trees, vegetations and rivers, the continuity of the pre-Islamic representational regime. However, this view is untenable for various reasons this presentation will expose and discuss, in particular the plastic strategy of the iconography’s ornamentalization leading to its de-semantization, namely the suppression or severe tempering of the images’ intrinsic referential power. As a result of this strategy, the images turn into mute figural tautologies that serve an ornamental purpose and, consequently, dispossess the iconography of its representational properties. The ultimate proof that such a revolutionary approach to images is at work in Umayyad religious architecture resides in the little known figural zoomorphic ornament in the qibla wall of the Spanish-Umayyad Mosque in Cordoba. The examination of this figuration together with the Syrian Umayyad mosaics in mosque architecture will support the theory that from its inception, Islamic art at large took an ornamental turn, to never deviate from it until the era of colonialism. Valerie Gonzalez Specialism: history of Islamic art and architecture, Islamic aesthetics and visual culture past and present PhD advisor, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan valerie.gonzalez152@googlemail.com https://soas.academia.edu/VGonzalez https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Valerie-Gonzalez-4 ORCID 0000-0001-8259-900X