ABSTRACT
As a term used to describe decorative motifs and strategies across an astonishing range of art forms—visual art, architecture and design, literature, music, and dance—arabesque calls out for interdisciplinary study. Of ancient origins, with a central role in the art and architecture of Arab lands, arabesque was prized in nineteenth-century Europe especially as a figure of imaginative freedom, license, and invention. Over this period, claims of affinity and mutual inspiration, sometimes aided by metaphor, traverse and intertwine the histories of different art forms in creative practice as well as in theory. Yet an intermedial approach, however justified, risks magnifying the definitional instability that has characterized arabesque in its varied historical and cultural uses. Self-reflexive, with its specific qualities varying in each instance, arabesque under an interdisciplinary lens may be better viewed not as a form but as a vector for aesthetic inquiry.
