Arabesque (architecture)

See also: Arabesque

The arabesque is an ornament of painting, sculpture, engraving or mosaic repeating of stylized symmetries which evoke the shapes of plants, more rarely of animals (the representation of the latter being disadvised in Islam). It is one of the characteristics of the Islamic decorative art. The choice of the geometrical forms and their fitting rises from a vision of the world specific to the Islamique universe. For a Moslem, these forms constitute reasons from which the repetition extends beyond the visible material world: they symbolize the nature infinite - and deprived of center - creation. Like the Christian iconography, the arabesque is the expression of a spirituality.

In the Occidental culture

In spite of the Moslem presence in Spain, it is by the commercial relationship between the Middle East and Venice that is introduced into Western art, with the Italian Renaissance, the term of arabesque (although the term of Entrelacs is already used). It could be also written rabesques (Synonymous with moresque , also written Moorish , coming from the Moor S), it clearly suggests the Moslem origin of the reason.
Si one finds trace of it since 1308-1311 in the tables of Duccio to His, it will be necessary to await it so that the kind diffuses in the tables of the Venetian painters Cima da Conegliano (1460-1465), Vittore Carpaccio (1525-1526) and Palma Vecchio. As from this time, one meets the arabesques in the illustrations of books, struck the bindings, painted on earthenware, embroidered on the costumes, decorating with the tapestries and the objects out of metal.

Used in the dishes of the bindings of the books decorated with the gold sheet called went damaschina (according to the way of Damas) in Italy, the moresques ones will be used in France in the books connected for the king Louis XII (about 1510) and the first book entirely devoted to moresques is that of the Florentin established in France, Francesco Pellegrino (1530) and then, in an original way in Europe, in the ornamentation of the illustrations of the books by the editors of Lyon and Paris: the framings the moresques ones by B. Solomon since 1547 for books published in Lyon that of G. Paradin, Memoriae nostrae , (1548), the Metamorphosis of Ovide illustrated , by J. of Turn (1557). Jacques Androuet of the Hoop (1563) will gather essence in its prints of it.

In Germany and England, books of models, partly copied according to the Italians are published.

Then, at the 18th century a confusion however settles with the grotesque (different by their use of figures human and animal, even chimerical) and will divert the use of the word arabesque of it; thus in the catalogs of sale, the drawings the grotesque ones of the pupils of Raphaël are described like arabesques.
Aux 19th century and at the 20th century, the name of arabesque is given to all models of set of lines and it is recommended to use the moresque word to avoid confusions and to recall the exact cultural origin of it.

Related technical terms

The arabesques (term evoking a stylized curved form) can return in many descriptive technical terms of the ornaments of the Islamic palates, the such Azulejos (painted stucco) or the Zelliges, mosaics represented here.

See too

External bond

  • Elvira association and the Santamaria artist, organizers of the '' Festival of the Arabesque '' to [[Prayssac] in 2000]

  • decorative Materials of Morocco

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