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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
‘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.’
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.’
