Verse Arabesque

Abstract

Verse Arabesque Ewan Jones (bio) In the long list of things that John Ruskin did not like, Raphael's Vatican loggias come near the top: "Raphael's arabesque," he writes in the third volume of The Stones of Venice, "is mere elaborate idleness. It has neither meaning nor heart in it; it is an unnatural and monstrous abortion."1 In condemning these frescoes, which decorated the corridor space of the Apostolic Palace (see Fig. 1), Ruskin ran (as often) counter to the spirit of the time. He elsewhere cheerfully conceded as much: "I know what authority there is against me. I remember the scrolls of Perugino's angels, and the ribands of Raphael's arabesques and of Ghiberti's glorious bronze flowers: no matter; they are every one of them vices and uglinesses" (W, 8: 149). Even J. M. W. Turner, Ruskin's exemplary modern artist, disagreed, having conducted a detailed study of the loggia during his first Italian tour of 1819–1820. Ruskin's repeated choice of the word "arabesque" is worthy of note, given that art criticism more typically considers the loggia under a related but distinct heading. Raphael produced his frescoes shortly after the late fifteenth-century rediscovery of Nero's Domus Aurea, whose preserved subterranean frescoes sparked a European craze for the grotesque: literally, art of the grotto. The visual arts of the following centuries teemed with re-creations (or imagined confabulations) of this prior idiom, which interwove inter alia flowers, stalks, stems, scrolls, fruit, tendrils, genii, satyrs, and human body parts, in fluid and elaborate designs.2 The provenance and denotation of "arabesque" is, by comparison, rather muddled. A concept often emerges in obscurity only to decay into semantic ambiguity: in the case of this term, at least so far as Anglophone culture is concerned, the gestation was rapid enough as to stifle useful cognitive work in the interim. The word is conspicuous by its absence until the very late eighteenth century: a handful of earlier encyclopedias and dictionaries employ it only as a geographic identifier, as when The Builder's Dictionary (1734) diffusely defines "arabesque" (or "arabesk") as "something done after the manner of the Arabians."3 The first systematic elaboration of the concept occurs only with the German late classicists and Frühromantiker, for whom, as Winfried Menninghaus has explored at length, it exerts an increasingly pivotal role in literary production (Ludwig Tieck's Ritter Blaubart, 1797), aesthetic theory [End Page 465] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Arabesque decorations in Raphael's Vatican loggia, in Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2016), p. 459. (Karl-Phillip Mortiz, Friedrich Schlegel, and Immanuel Kant), and the plastic arts (Philipp Otto Runge's print series The Times of the Day, 1802–1810).4 Yet these varied theorizations and practices did not, on the whole, percolate into Anglophone discourse, even as the German romanticists in question used British materials so as to ground the concept—as when Schlegel treated the [End Page 466] multiple digressions of Tristram Shandy (and the shaking of Uncle Toby's stick) under the rubric of novelistic arabesque.5 A pan-European vogue for "Orientalized" design, along with this half-digested diet of German aesthetics, did allow the term to spread in Anglophone culture through the nineteenth century, albeit without overmuch consistency. The successive editions of John Henry Parker's glossary of architectural terms neatly demonstrate the shifts in the term: in 1838, he interchanges "grotesque" and "arabesque," concluding rather unhelpfully that neither should be used; by 1840, a fuller entry anchors the device in the Islamic prohibition on representation of the human figure, concluding, "Arabesque ornament in sculpture, if not kept very low in relief, is apt to become grotesque"; by 1850, he has abandoned all attempt to disarticulate the two terms.6 Alongside "arabesque's" comparably vague semantic neighbor "moresque," the term thereby typically represents a conceptual porridge of one or more of the following: (a) exotic Orientalism; (b) abstraction; (c) serial pattern; (d) fantastical imagination. The conjunction became proverbial enough for Edgar Allan Poe to famously employ it as the title designation for one of his collections of short stories...