Tales of the Arabesque

Not quite a year ago, further to a post here about the grotesque in art, Marly asked if I might also write something similar about the arabesque. This idea rested on a cold back-burner until a couple of weeks ago, when I acquired a booklet entitled Some Main Streams and Tributaries in European Ornament from 1500 to 1750 by Peter Ward-Jackson, in which are reprinted some articles that had first been published in a 1967 issue of The Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin. One of these articles was specifically concerned with the arabesque, and is my source for the images (and for most of the information) below.
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The very term arabesque is a rather diffuse one, sometimes used broadly to denote almost any style of geometric ornamentation prevalent in Islamic nations, but here I will take it as referring more specifically to stylised vegetal decoration ‘in which plants and leaves grow according to the laws of geometry rather than nature,’ forming ‘interlaced straps, zizags, spirals, scrolls and knots’ which tend to fall into complicated polygonal shapes, in turn forming separate frames for other patterns inside them. Use of this type of decoration, which apparently originated in 10th-Century Baghdad, became widespread throughout the Islamic world in the following centuries.
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While stylised, interlaced ornament was not unknown in classical and mediæval Europe, the arabesque proper seems to have made a relatively sudden appearance in Renaissance Italy ca. 1530, with Venice as its likely point of entry. ‘Venice was a great market for Islamic wares, some of which were made in Venice itself by the Moslem community that lived there.’ The first image above shows part of a damascened brass vessel thought to have been made by a Venetian Moslem craftsman in the early 16th Century. Similar patterns, known even then as Arabesque, (or Moresque, or Saracenic) were used in the decoration of book-bindings, manuscripts, textiles and pottery.
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‘This then,’ writes Ward-Jackson, ‘was the Saracenic ornament which certain Italian artists began to study and to copy during the 1530s, precisely in the decade when a new kind of scrollwork […] was beginning to emerge in the palace of Fontainebleau under the direction of Rosso Fiorentino.’ ‘It so happens,’ he continues ‘that the author of one of the first books of Moresque ornaments to be published in Europe, the Italian artist Francesco Pellegrini, was one of Rosso's assistants in the work of decorating the Palace.’ Ward-Jackson then speculates that Pellegrini ‘may have introduced Rosso to the Moresque, and Rosso’s knowledge of this free linear ornament may have encouraged him in his own experiments with bands and scrolls, [although] the Saracenic influence is not very perceptible in Rosso’s own work.’
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This novel style was quickly circulated throughout Europe by means of pattern-books illustrating arabesques on needlework, jewellery, furniture, weaponry, etc., etc. The designs reproduced in Pellegrini’s volume (fig. 2), were intended for embroiderers. Some similar patterns were printed without a specific decorative context, such as the mid-16th-Century designs by the engraver Jean Gourmont (figs. 3 & 4). Others were shown in situ as embellishments on finished objects, such as the decoration on the cup designed by Hans Holbein the Younger shown above (fig. 5) in a later print by Wenceslas Hollar, or the pattern on the ‘pilgrim bottle’ (fig. 6), designed by the Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer.
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By the mid-17th Century, the vogue for ‘pure’ arabesque had faded—Pierre Firens’s design for a dish (fig. 7) being a relatively late example. Arabesques, though seldom used any more in isolation, came to be an essential part of the design vocabulary of the 18th-Century rococo style, having been proved ‘capable of combining harmoniously with traditional classical motifs, above all with the grotesque.’ Even in the 16th Century, some designers had begun to combine grotesque and arabesque elements together: the patterns by Balthasar Sylvius in fig. 8, above, are an example. The ewer by Georg Wechter shown in fig. 9 is another hybrid design, where Fontainebleau-style strapwork is interlaced in an arabesque-like manner.
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The design by Lucas Kilian (fig. 10) foreshadows the rococo deployment of grotesque elements following vaguely arabesque patterns around a central frame. The next image (by Jean Berain, fig. 11) is another example of what is, ostensibly, a grotesque, but again, one in which the ‘movement of the lines, the ogival patterns which they form when intersecting, and above all, the tendency of the bands to fall into polygonal patterns within the design’ we see ‘features typical of the arabesque.’ The final image above, a mid-18th Century ceiling design by François de Cuviliés the Elder seems no less distant from the the origins of the arabesque, but even so (according to Ward-Jackson) ‘the same basic features are still there: the lines of bandwork, alternately straight and scrolled, the acanthus foliage sprouting from them at intervals, the complex interlacements, and the tendency of the lines to form separate polygonal compartments.’