Samarran stucco styles (A, B, C)

Stucco is plaster mixed with cement or concrete; it was widely used in pre-Islamic Parthian and Sassanian architecture in Persia and Iraq, valued for its flexibility, ease of handling and speed in covering coarse surfaces such as brickwork with fine decoration. ¹ No stucco survives in the mosques of Samarra, but much was excavated in its ruined palaces such as Balkuwara and the Jausaq al-Khaqani; Ernst Herzfeld first classified it, and he and Creswell divided it into three styles that coexisted through the period with no firm chronology. ¹ All three are a new synthesis of motifs established in Hellenistic, Byzantine, Sassanian and Umayyad art, built on the vine with its leaves and grapes, with palmettes, rosettes and cornucopia. ¹

The closest to the Western tradition and the most naturalistic: five-lobed stylised vine leaves with incised veins and drilled "eyes" between the lobes, bound by stalks, scrolling along borders or rolled into six-lobed beaded panels, sometimes alternating with bunches of grapes in hexagonal panels; the carving is dense and deep, leaving leaves and grapes in sharp relief. ¹

Figure and ground are in balance: leaves and palmettes are more abstract, with no stems to link them, and are organised in the surface geometry of polylobes, polygons, squares and rectangles; Yeomans sees here the genesis of the Islamic arabesque. ¹ It is the dominant style in the stucco of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, above all in the soffits of the arches facing the sahn. ^{2 3}

Less rich and dense but more radically abstract: open-ended symmetrical repeat patterns over large surfaces, in shallow, undulating, bevelled relief, cast from baked clay moulds so that it could be assembled and installed very quickly. ² Its motifs are ambiguous, suggesting vases, bottles, spearheads, volutes, palmettes and birds, not framed in compartments, so that figure becomes ground and ground figure. ²

Yeomans holds that style C had the most enduring influence on the decorative arts of Egypt: stucco fragments from the houses of Fustat in the Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo, show it, and it became a vehicle for decorating pottery, rock crystal and woodwork, lasting into the Ikhshidid and Fatimid eras, so that its bevelled patterns appear more than a century later in the tie-beams and doors of the mosque of al-Hakim. ³

In this context Yeomans sets out his view that geometric forms in Islamic art are dynamic, open and infinite, and that its vegetal ornament is stylised and two-dimensional, respecting the surface, unlike Hellenistic art with its pull towards naturalism and closed forms; he cites Owen Jones, for whom the leaves of Greek scrollwork grow out of the surface while Islamic design works with it. ³