ABSTRACT
Transportable luxury artefacts and manuscript illuminations as well as monuments and spolia served as models for iconographic motifs in Umayyad visual culture. The iconographies were transferred in a two-step process as an object appropriation followed by a motif appropriation. While the models for some iconographic motifs are fairly obvious, in other cases it is much more difficult to determine their origin, as is exemplified by geometrical patterns. They were part of Late Antiquity’s ‘visual koine’, shaped through intercultural exchange, of which the Umayyads strived to be a part.
