The Arabesque

I've posted a video - really more of a slide show with music - on learn@uw, with examples of the arabesque in art, architecture, and decoration, in materials as diverse as marble, ivory, mosaic, tile, carved stucco, wood, brass, ceramic, and paper. The background is some superb `oud music in one of the classical forms of Middle Eastern music. The Arabic al-`oud, when Europeans took it up, it became the lute, immediate ancestor of the guitar. There is a great deal of improvisation in classical Arab music, though the forms or maqam-s by which it is structured are quite strict. I made the original video some time ago but have used it to experiment with techniques and settings, so you'll see some crude survivals among the better looking new images. Some are just amazing (the images, that it, not my medieval MTV rendering of them).

As we've seen, all of the monotheistic religions feared that images could lead the naive to worship them, the memory of the worship of images of pagan gods rarely far out of mind. Of the three, Islam was generally most hostile, especially in public spaces, through there were and are many exceptions. The arabesque, an art form based on geometrical patterns to which no objection could be made, became early on the principal form of the visual arts in the world of Islam. It has long been known that behind the more complex patterns was a sophisticated mathematics, but until recently it wasn't appreciated just how far in advance of its time the equations required for the most complex patterns were (plane crystallographic groups, for one, if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat). Europeans long tried to copy the Arabesque, filigree being one particularly ornate example. However, by imitating the forms without understanding what generated them them they never advanced beyond craft or "minor decorative art".

The arabesque illustrates two other themes we've touched on: cultural fusion under the aegis of Islam
and continuities from Late Antiquity and the early Islamic period. The East Romans, Sasanians, and the so-called Arab "military patronage states" all had their own kinds of abstract decoration, some of which you'll see near the beginning of the video. These were largely based on floral and vegetal patterns, and were more the product of craft than art, their makers tending to reproduce what they were good at rather than experimenting and pushing the boundaries of the medium. The Arabs fused these different traditions, influenced in this as in much else by the Sasanians more than the East Romans, and brought them to ever higher orders of abstraction. By the third century after the hijra, artists were experimenting with arabesque designs in every medium possible, many of which of which you'll find represented here. The images are in rough chronological order, from Late Antiquity to the late Middle Ages, so the first ones will be cruder and less interesting than those that came later.


As the arabesque became a sophisticated abstract art in the early `Abbasid period this is probably the right time to discuss it. But like so much else one can argue the case for continuity as easily as the one for change. Whichever position one inclines to, the argument often turns around the question of what distinguished a craft or handicraft from an art: what do you think? As blogspot doesn't permit adding images I'll add a link to a set of pre-Islamic images on Picasa, click the slideshow link for "pre-Islamic decoration" to go through them quickly. Gotta run so the slides will be up some time this evening.