Arabesque (Islamic art) in the context of "Arab art"

Islamic art is a part of Islamic culture and encompasses the visual arts produced since the 7th century CE by people who lived within territories inhabited or ruled by Muslim populations. Referring to characteristic traditions across a wide range of lands, periods, and genres, Islamic art is a concept used first by Western art historians in the late 19th century. Public Islamic art is traditionally non-representational, except for the widespread use of plant forms, usually in varieties of the spiralling arabesque. These are often combined with Islamic calligraphy, geometric patterns in styles that are typically found in a wide variety of media, from small objects in ceramic or metalwork to large decorative schemes in tiling on the outside and inside of large buildings, including mosques. Other forms of Islamic art include Islamic miniature painting, artefacts like Islamic glass or pottery, and textile arts, such as carpets and embroidery.

The early developments of Islamic art were influenced by Roman art, Early Christian art (particularly Byzantine art), and Sassanian art, with later influences from Central Asian nomadic traditions. Chinese art had a significant influence on Islamic painting, pottery, and textiles. From its beginnings, Islamic art has been based on the written version of the Quran and other seminal religious works, which is reflected by the important role of calligraphy, representing the word as the medium of divine revelation.

In some forms of Islamic art, aniconism (the avoidance of images of sentient beings) stems in part from the prohibition of idolatry and in part from the belief that the creation of living forms is God's prerogative.

The Quran itself does not prohibit visual representation of any living being. The hadith collection of Sahih Bukhari explicitly prohibits the making of images of living beings, challenging painters who "breathe life" into their images and threatening them with punishment on the Day of Judgment. Muslims have interpreted these prohibitions in different ways in different times and places. Religious Islamic art has been typically characterized by the absence of figures and extensive use of calligraphic, geometric and abstract floral patterns.

Islamic ornament is the use of decorative forms and patterns in Islamic art and Islamic architecture. Its elements can be broadly divided into the arabesque, using curving plant-based elements, geometric patterns with straight lines or regular curves, and calligraphy, consisting of religious texts with stylized appearance, used both decoratively and to convey meaning. All three often involve elaborate interlacing in various mediums.

Islamic ornament has had a significant influence on European decorative art forms, especially as seen in the Western arabesque.

The scroll in art is an element of ornament and graphic design featuring spirals and rolling incomplete circle motifs, some of which resemble the edge-on view of a book or document in scroll form, though many types are plant-scrolls, which loosely represent plant forms such as vines, with leaves or flowers attached. Scrollwork is a term for some forms of decoration dominated by spiralling scrolls, today used in popular language for two-dimensional decorative flourishes and arabesques of all kinds, especially those with circular or spiralling shapes.

Scroll decoration has been used for the decoration of a vast range of objects, in all Eurasian cultures, and most beyond. A lengthy evolution over the last two millennia has taken forms of plant-based scroll decoration from Greco-Roman architecture to Chinese pottery, and then back across Eurasia to Europe. They are very widespread in architectural decoration, woodcarving, painted ceramics, mosaic, and illuminated manuscripts (mostly for borders).

The "Luck of Edenhall" is an enamelled glass beaker that was made in Syria or Egypt in the middle of the 14th century, elegantly decorated with arabesques in blue, green, red and white enamel with gilding. It is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is 15.8 cm high and 11.1 cm wide at the brim. It had reached Europe by the 15th century, when it was provided with a decorated stiff case in boiled leather with a lid, which includes the Christian IHS; this no doubt helped it to survive over the centuries.

The beaker is now known to be an exceptionally fine and pristine example of 14th-century luxury Islamic glass. The antiquity of the legend surrounding it has not been determined. A number of rare objects owned by families in the North of England were known as "lucks"; the glass is first documented, and named as the "Luck of Edenhall", in 1677 in the will of Sir Philip Musgrave.