Line, pattern and surface

Look at each pattern and name what you see with the design terms you know: line, shape, repetition, balance and others. Say which one makes the strongest effect.

Ask whether the effect comes from adding something to a surface or from taking something away. Describe the steps the record names and what each step leaves behind.

Eva Baer, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam article on ornament, divides the development of vegetal ornament into stages. In the first centuries, she says, a great variety of motifs was adopted from earlier civilisations. Acanthus and vine leaves, palmettes, half-palmettes, lotus blossoms and grapes were flattened into two dimensions and composed without a background, giving abstract designs whose floral origin remains recognisable. The best examples come from late eighth-century Syria and from ninth-century Samarra, and spread from there to Egypt and elsewhere. Spain was less affected, keeping the deeply carved, folded and so three-dimensional leaves of Umayyad tradition, as in the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock and the eastern facade of Mshatta. ²

When does the arabesque begin? The Encyclopaedia of Islam article on the arabesque says it is not yet completely developed in the Umayyad period, acquires its typical shape in the ninth century under the Abbasids and in Islamic Spain, and appears fully developed in the eleventh century. ³ Yeomans sees the genesis of the Islamic arabesque in Samarra style B, where leaves and palmettes become abstract, lose their stems and are organised into the surface geometry of polygons and polylobes. ⁴ On the arabesque itself, Baer writes that its preliminary stages may date from the eleventh century but that it reached its full scope in the two centuries that followed. ² Each date belongs to its author, and the record does not say whether they use the word in the same sense.

Look at how each of these accounts reaches you. Yeomans's narrative rests on the Arabic sources as modern scholarship transmits them, and it sets out where scholars disagree on dating. ^5 6 7 The opening of Baer's discussion of meaning cannot be read in the copy the museum used. ⁸ The names of the artists who introduced the arabesque to Italy and France cannot be read reliably in the copy used, so they are left out. ³ Ask what each unreadable passage might have changed.

Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: which date should a textbook give for the beginning of the arabesque, the ninth century, when Yeomans sees its genesis and the article says it took its typical shape, or the eleventh, when it appears fully developed?

• Arabesque: the two articles and Yeomans's account, side by side.
• Samarran stucco styles: the three styles, and what Yeomans says of style B.
• The Dome of the Rock: the mosaics Baer cites as an example of folded leaves.
• Girih: a short record on interlacing bands that build stars and polygons.