“ The Nature of Islamic Art.” (October 2001)ĭepartment of Islamic Art. “ The Art of the Umayyad Period in Spain (711–1031).” (October 2001)ĭepartment of Islamic Art. “ Turkmen Jewelry.” (August 2011)ĭepartment of Islamic Art. “ The Art of the Almoravid and Almohad Periods (ca.

Additional Essays by Department of Islamic Artĭepartment of Islamic Art. The Arabesque: Meaning and Transformation of an Ornament. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. “Vegetal Patterns in Islamic Art.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. With the exception of the garden and its usual reference to paradise, vegetal motifs and patterns in Islamic art are largely devoid of symbolic meaning.ĭepartment of Islamic Art. In the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (present-day Turkey, Iran, and India), complicated versions of established patterns were utilized, sometimes incorporating a new interest in naturalistic-looking flowers or blossoms. In sixteenth-century Europe, first in Italy and then in the north, Islamic-style vegetal patterns were developed.

This period saw many transformations in the decorative language of Islamic art that would endure for centuries. With the Mongol invasion of western Asia in the thirteenth century and the establishment of a Mongol court in Iran in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, numerous Chinese motifs and patterns were adopted, though sometimes in markedly revised form. Arabesque simply means “in the Arab fashion” in French, and few scholars of Islamic art use it today. It was not until the medieval period (tenth–twelfth centuries) that a highly abstract and fully developed Islamic style emerged, featuring that most original and ubiquitous pattern often known as “arabesque.” This term was coined in the early nineteenth century following Napoleon’s famed expedition in Egypt, which contributed so much to the phenomenon of Orientalism in Europe and later in the United States.

The early centuries of the Islamic era saw the initial adoption of semi-naturalistic pre-Islamic motifs and patterns, followed by widespread and highly diverse experimentation adapting these forms to suit the aesthetic interests and tastes of the new Muslim patrons. Unlike calligraphy, whose increasingly popular use as ornament in the early Islamic Arab lands represented a new development, vegetal patterns and the motifs they incorporate were drawn from existing traditions of Byzantine culture in the eastern Mediterranean and Sasanian Iran. Vegetal patterns employed alone or in combination with the other major types of ornament- calligraphy, geometric pattern, and figural representation-adorn a vast number of buildings, manuscripts, objects, and textiles produced throughout the Islamic world.

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