Arabesque
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Arabesques are an elaborate design of intertwined floral drawings or complex geometrical patterns. This ornamental design is manly used in Islamic art and architecture
Metaphorical usage
Example (meaning: sprawling):
- "The Hollywood Hallucination introduces Parker Tyler’s critical arabesques, elaborated in his later books, concerning Mae West, Mickey Mouse, the Good Villain and the Bad Hero"
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
There has been some debate over the meaning of Poe's terms "Grotesque" and "Arabesque" in his short story collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Both terms refer to a type of art used to decorate walls.
It has been theorized the the "grotesque" stories are those where the character becomes a caricature or satire, as in "The Man That Was Used Up." The "arabesque" stories focus on a single aspect of a character, often psychological, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher."
From Il Giornale Nuovo
- "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." --Il Giornale Nuovo, June 2007
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Arabesque" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
