ABSTRACT
The idea of the “arabesque” was first born out of commercial interactions between Europe and the Islamic world. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so-called arabesque forms drawn from Islamic art and architecture reached European audiences through large-format print publications that sought to capture complex systems of ornament from the Islamic world. Three-dimensional monuments and objects were rendered into two-dimensional imagery—all in the name of scholarship and, less overtly but no less importantly, nation-craft and territorial interests. This chapter will show how, by spatchcocking the arabesque, splitting it from form and flattening it against the page, nineteenth-century theorists of ornament and their publications minimized the cognitive dimensions of Islamic ornament and obscured the extent of the craftsmen’s achievements. This chapter will reconstruct the spatchcocking of the arabesque through big books of architectural data and universal design compendia, following those books as they canonize Tulunid architectural decoration in Cairo, construct ethnic evolutionary lineages of curvilinear design, and translate three-dimensional artworks into two-dimensional reproducible commodities.
