While the focus of the research of TCR 2-50 contributor Laura U. Marks remains primarily on the vector-like qualities of Islamic calligraphy, she does draw our attention to one of the origins of the free and lively line of Islamic art:
I will just note that both writing and curvilinear patterns function in very similar ways in much of Islamic art: as ornament that performs the meaning of a space. A typically Islamic form, the so-called “Third Samarra Style,” erupted in Iraq during the Abbasid caliphate sometime in the 9th century. In this decoration, the plant forms of Byzantine and other prototypes were abstracted and flowed together in an endless metamorphosis. This style developed in Mesopotamia and spread like wildfire to everywhere but Spain, which kept Umayyad vegetal style. Gülrü Necipoglu likens it to “primordial matter” in The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and Architecture in the Humanities, 1995).
Made of stucco, the Third Samarra Style shows the sure and sweeping movements of the craftsman, working while the material was still wet. (These pieces were pried off the walls of a palace in Samarra, Iraq, and carted off to the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, where they now reside.) Art historians fall over themselves to qualify this style as the origin of the arabesque and other kinds of overall ornament in Islamic art. In the arabesque, the line multiplies, branches, and doubles back on itself until it takes on an additional dimension: fractal-style. It almost becomes a plane. It gives the eye freedom to roam in all directions.
In The Stones of Vencie, John Ruskin muses on the material of ornament. “We have no more to do with heavy stones and hard lines; we are going to be happy: to look round int the world and discover (in a serious manner always however, and under a sense of responsibility) what we like best in it, and to enjoy the same at our leisure: to gather it, examine it, fasten all we can of it into imperishable forms, and but it where we may see it forever. This is to decorate architecture.”
The proper material of ornament will be whatever God has created; and its proper treatment, that which seems in accordance with or symbolical of His laws. And, for material, we shall therefore have, first, the abstract lines which are most frequent in nature; and then, from lower to higher, the whole range of systematized inorganic and organic forms.
Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
Abstract lines, Ruskin notes, are “the most frequent contours of natural objects, transferred to architectural forms… For instance, the lone or curve of the edge of a leaf may be accurately given to the edge of a stone, without rendering the stone in the least like a leaf, of suggestive of a leaf; and thus the more fully, because the lines of nature are alike in all her works; simpler or richer in combination, but the same in character; and when they are taken out of their combinations it is impossible to say from which of her works they have been borrowed, their universal property being that of ever-varying curvature in the most subtle and subdued transitions, with peculiar expressions of motion, elasticity, or dependence.”
“Now that is something not to think but to link.”
Gertrude Stein, How to Write
other islands in this text-fed stream
