Geometric arabesque. What is an arabesque? Definition and meaning of the word arabesque

That's why arabesque perceived as a continuous pattern " carpet style".

A type of ornament that has developed in Muslim countries and is built on the principle of the endless development of repeating groups ( rapports) geometric, floral or epigraphic motifs, which creates the impression of a rich whimsical pattern. Arabesque is a complex pattern, which is based on a strict mathematical calculation; built on the repetition or multiplication of one or more elements - geometric shapes or plant motifs. In drawing arabesques individual images of animals, birds, people, fantastic creatures, as well as inscriptions can be intertwined. Such an ornament practically excludes the background: one pattern fits into another, densely filling the surface. The Europeans called this principle fear of emptiness».

Drawing according to its rhythm arabesques consonant with classical Arabic poetry and music, it is consistent with the ideas of Muslim theologians about " the indefinitely continuing fabric of the universe". Infinite, " current» in a given rhythm movement arabesques can be stopped or continued at any point without violating the integrity of the pattern.

arabesque can be placed on a surface of any configuration and size: on the wall of a building or carpet, on the binding of a manuscript, ceramics or jewelry.

Arabesquebuilt on the principle of endless development andrhythmic repetition of geometric or floral motifs, has a crushed character of the pattern, therefore it is perceived as a continuous pattern " carpet style".
It may include exquisite Arabic script graphics. received a special distribution arabesques during the Renaissance.

This one arose on East, hence its name, spread inByzantium, in romanesqueandgothicartilluminationmanuscripts ( handwritten books), and then, in the XIV-XV centuries, under the influenceHispano-Moorish artfound application inornamentaland paintedItalian majolicaera.

Authentic oriental arabesque sometimes included Arabicletters- a letter incomprehensible to Europeans. Hence the origin"kufi" , or Kufic style, " pseudo-Arabic script".

Hereinafter, the term arabesque " received a narrower meaning, they began to call only a floral ornament of oriental origin, andmaritime (Spanish moresque - "Moorish") is geometric.

In the broad sense of the word arabesque generally called any complicated, ornate, exquisite - ornamental. ATTurkeylike ornament called"rumi" .

ATMuslim art, in particular in countriesCentral Asia, arabesque- conceptand evenphilosophical - "life style", waythinking in poetry, music and ornamental variations.

Like a way , based on inversion and infinite variation -combinatorics- the same shapes arabesque inherent in the Muslim , carving on tree, stone and gancha, irrigation patterns, coinage on metal, mosaic, luster murals and glass.

In one of the early works - a series "Arabesque" (1704-1706 ) - the French artist A. Watteau varied several given figures and frames almost to infinity, creating more and more.

In the era of Europeanneoclassical and Romanticismsecond half of the 18th - early 19th centuries, and in particular in connection with sensational discoveries in Italy, inHerculaneum and Pompeii, on the wave of passion arabesque began to unreasonably identify with another, outwardly similar ornament of ancient Roman origin. Ornament "arabesque "began to be called"Pompeian" , and then at all "Rafaele" because Raphael and his students painted the grotesque ornamentLoggias in vatican (1517-1519 ).

Arabesque, or grotesques ( from the word "grotto"), first attracted attention in connection with the opening of the palace of Nero in the Renaissance Domus Aurea. Here, preserved fragments of wall paintings were discovered, in which purely decorative ornamental motifs, connected by a ligature of intricate lines, played a large role. The vignettes, which linked various figurative scenes, gave the wall and ceiling paintings a certain compositional unity.

O of particular importance is the fact that, at its climax, artarabesquesreached in the works of the workshop of Raphael, who took his student Giovanni da Udine to the caves of Domus Aurea. Giovanni da Udine had the honor of restoring the ancient " stucco", allowing you to create sophisticated stucco. And it was to him that Raphael entrusted work on the grotesques in the Vatican loggias.

Purely technically " grotesques"allowed to bring together a large pictorial space, decorated with many heterogeneous images. But it is significant thatarabesquesespecially attracted to Raphael. On the one hand, of course, they reflected Raphael's evolution towards the mass production of decorative motifs and, accordingly, the need to quickly fill large areas. On the other hand, it was Raphael, with his interest in ideality, who turned out to be an excellent translator of ancientarabesqueduring the Renaissance. Arabesque did not belong to any space and performed an absolutely non-mimetic role of decorative unification of fragments into a whole.

Nicole Dakos writes about trendsarabesqueGiovanni da Udine, who more and more filled his ornaments with images of plants, and . But these naturalistic elements combined in the highest degree fantasyarabesque, which connected figures that have neither intelligible localization nor intelligible function.Nachahmunghere he casually passed intoDarstellung. Picturesfrom nature they had an autonomous status, each seemed to be self-sufficient, but at the same time they were not free from the perfect speculation of ornamental lines. The birds of Udine seem to have no arabesque no relation but arabesque have no justification whatsoever. It is this strange connectedness" and " autonomy» items inarabesquesallowed them to become the basis of Renaissance allegorism and hieroglyphics. In this way,arabesquealready in the works of Raphael's circle it functions as a mediator between autonomous realistic fragments and pure speculationlines expressing the freedom of artistic imagination.

Critics of the grotesques usually relied on the authority of Vitruvius, who strongly condemned the image " monstrosities instead of representing certain things truthfully"and argued that the judgment of lovers of the grotesques" clouded by decadent critical principles". Defenders of the grotesques, such as Ligorio and Lomazzo, for example, argued that behind their apparent absurdity lies a hidden allegorical mystical meaning. Ligorio believed that the more incoherent the elements of the grotesques seem and the more connected their weaving, the deeper the general content hidden in them. Hence the typical understanding of the grotesques in terms of Neoplatonism, as intermediate figures of the imagination. It is precisely the grotesques that weave the connection between the worlds, as " astral amulets»Neoplatonism, about which Gombrich wrote.

It is significant that Luca Signorelli in the Cathedral of Orvieto used grotesques to depict purgatory, that is, precisely the intermediate world, so closely associated with the imagination. It is not surprising, of course, that the grotesque is systematically associated with dreams.

In Germany, interest inarabesqueand their discovery in the era awakened Goethe's article " About arabesques » ( 1789 ).

Special impulse aesthetic development arabesque received in Kant's aesthetics. AT " Criticism of the ability of judgment» ( 1790 ) Kant distinguished two types of beauty - free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and the accompanying beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). Concomitant beauty presupposes the concept of the object and evaluates its perfection in accordance with this concept. Free beauty is independent of the concept of the object. " Flowers are the free beauty of nature. Hardly anyone but a botanist knows what a flower should be.', explains Kant. The best example of free beauty isarabesques:

« Drawingsa la grecque , leaf ornament on frames or wallpaper, etc. by themselves mean nothing; they do not depict anything, they do not depict an object subsumed under a certain concept; they are free beauty."

How about an example arabesqueKant speaks of various kinds of curls and light regular strokes, similar to the tattoo of the inhabitants of New Zealand».
A few pages earlier, Kant writes about " jewelry» - parerga- as about something that is not included in the idea of ​​​​the subject, but is only purely externally connected with it, “like picture frames, or a colonnade around a magnificent building ". But the decoration does not arouse Kant's approval, since it " just added» from the outside like « golden frame», « called embellishment and harms true beauty».

Difference betweenarabesqueand decoration lies in the fact that the first is self-sufficient and therefore expresses " free beauty”, and the second is dependent on the subject and is attached to it from the outside. As Jacques Derrida remarked on this subject, the frame means nothing, while the arabesque has a desire for meaning:

“...here a movement towards meaning and representation has begun: leafy ornament, pure musical improvisation, music without a theme or text, as if they want to say or show something, they have the form of striving towards a certain goal.”

Jacques Souliou has shown that before the 18th century decoration was not seen as an external addition. For example, in architectural theories"It was rooted in the aesthetics of orders, which were not at all thought of as some kind of external excess. According to Zuliyu, the modern understanding of decoration only arises in the classical era:

“Purely decorative betrays the loss of its origin, it has no genealogy, it is an orphan. Thus, it refers to a complete disconnection from the context.

But this is a detachment from the context of a certain type of appearance, namely appearance, which does not have integrity as a form of meaning that we project onto the chaos of reality. Arabesque acts inside the jewelry as an impulse to restore integrity, and therefore meaning. But beyond the impulsearabesquedoes not work, its meaning remains unclear. Suliya sees in " decorative» a copy of reality as something that has no meaning and reveals the absence of meaning at the same time « behind you»:

“The decorative appears under the mask of the double, but there is nothing behind this mask.”

Arabesqueis a way of avoiding the radical discovery of that void.

It is this striving for meaning that allowsarabesquebecome expressing not just free beauty, but precisely divine beauty.

Quite in the spirit of this kind of aesthetics, Runge experienced a revelation in which the usual ornamentalarabesquesuddenly becomes a form of mystical discovery of the whole and invisible connections. In a letter to Daniel Runge dated January 30, 1803, he writes that he worked on four paintings in the cycle " Times of the day", as over symphonies:

“Since in these four compositions I have four main ideas and the whole, I can easily tie them together using lightarabesques. As a simple decoration of rooms, all this, however, is a bit heavy food, but it does not matter - on the basis of such sketches, many less difficult sketches can easily be obtained, and all this, by the way, is much clearer than I thought at first.

Arabesquemust be separated from its traditional location - the wall and transferred to another - picturesque space, where it ceases to be an ornament and becomes a free hieroglyph of divine beauty. In March of the same year, Runge showed hisdrawingsTiku and puzzled him a lot:

“... everything that he never thought of himself as a visible image, but only foresaw it as some kind of general relationship, suddenly appeared visibly before him, turning all his ideas around - that no idea was expressed here, but big colors, figures and lines visibly trace the connections of mathematics, music and color.

By her own arabesquedoes not make sense, but creates a relationship, unites into a whole various semiotic spheres and conceivable spaces - music, color and mathematics. Runge's remarks are interesting in that they show how decorations (parerga) turn into a hieroglyphic play of form. But this transformation is possible primarily because between decoration and work (parergon and ergon) there is an inextricable link. Derrida wrote about decorations like frames that

"turns them into parerga not just the externality of the excess, but a structural connection that pushes them into the gaping inside ergon "a . And this gaping turns out to be constitutive for the very ergon "a . Without this gap Ergon would not need parergon "e. Absence in ergon" e is the absence parergon "a".

Arabesque in this case it turns out to be a linear expression of the movement from outside to inside and insideergon "abetween heterogeneous fragments. This is the only way to introduce aesthetic uniformity into the material chaos of a fragmented world.

Friedrich Schlegel, talking aboutarabesques, compared them with sacred breath»:

“It cannot be seized by force and mechanically, but it can be attracted by mortal beauty and is able to penetrate into it. This infinite being, his interest is by no means limited to characters, events, situations and individual inclinations; for a true poet, all this, no matter how close it captures his soul, is only a hint of the higher, the infinite, the hieroglyph of the one eternal love and the sacred life fullness of the creative nature.

The hieroglyph in this case becomes an expression of the endless striving for the absolute, which cannot be stopped and is not able to take any articulated final form. Hence, ultimately, the meaninglessness of this supreme hieroglyph, which, according to Winfried Menninghaus,

"can be read as an attempt to reinvest meaning in desymbolized objects, signs and images with the help of a referential reflections inarabesque».

For the romantic F. Schlegelarabesquewas the expressionmystical, absolutely free presentiment of infinity, perpetual motion", " visible music"and perfect" clean".

Strange grotesques glide
How wondrous arabesque row, -

wrote O. Wilde in 1881 ("The Whore's House").

arabesques " Pompeian" painted in FranceSèvres.

At the end of the XVIII century. in Russia arabesques also called unusual then ornaments discovered during the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii. In 1784 inPetersburg,inwinter palace, took place " looking"offered to Empress Catherine II" Arabesque service " fromporcelain, whose subjects were painted in " Pompeian" style. , drawings fabrics and wallpaper, embroidery, painting porcelain and glass.

"Arabesques"also called a collection of small literary works ( for example, collection N. V. Gogol "Arabesque" )

Arabesque - a popular motif of German romanticism, with which Gogol was in a complex and not fully clarified relationship. Gogol himself deliberately built his collection " Arabesque "as a mixture of heterogeneous material - journalism, aesthetics and prose. In a letter to M.P. Pogodin, he names the compositionbooks « all sorts of things", and in a letter to M. A. Maksimovich -" confusion», « a mixture of everything», « porridge».

concept arabesquesGogol reflects not just the heterogeneity of heterogeneous fragments included by the writer in the collection of his works, but also the presence of a movement capable of combining these fragments into a common form.

Gogol saw the modelarabesquesin gothic. An influential text on Gothic was Goethe's essay " About German architecture» ( 1773 ), written in the form of an appeal to the architect of the Strasbourg Cathedral, Erwin von Steinbach. Here Goethe criticizes classical architecture of the antiquities type for its fascination with columns and the dominance of large planes, which " the more boldly they ascend to heaven, the more they suppress our soul with their unbearable monotony". According to Goethe, the solution to the problem was found in the Gothic, which destroys the plane of the wall and is based on organic plant forms that can grow infinitely towards the sky. Goethe believed that in the process of evolution of art, beauty is only a late final formation. The history of art, on the other hand, consists mainly of contradictory clashes, harmonized by the very energy of growth. Goethe emphasizes the importance of growth so much that M. G. Abrame referred this essay by Goethe to the theories “ vegetative genius". Goethe writes of the growth of heterogeneous forms asarabesques, from which the totality arises:

“So the savage paints fantastic , frightening figures, paints coconuts, feathers and his body with bright colors. And even if the forms of such images are completely arbitrary, art will do without knowledge and observance for the influx gives it a characteristic integrity.

Friedrich Schlegel also saw the integrity of the Gothic in the organic growth inherent in it. Schelling compared the same Strasbourg Cathedral, which aroused Goethe's admiration, with a huge plantarabesque. In Schelling, the wall as an architectural element disappears altogether, and this is probably due to an attempt to eliminate the aesthetics of appearances, which usually take the formcanvas or facade, as in St. Petersburg.

Gogol echoes Goethe, but in a more excited» tone. Traffic arabesque lines in a gothic cathedral are designed to unceasingly turn upwards:

“Lines and corniceless Gothic pilasters, narrowly one after the other, should fly through the entire structure. Woe if they are far apart, if the building does not exceed at least twice its width, if not three times! It then destroyed itself. Elevate it as it should be: so that its walls rise higher, higher, as high as possible, so that countless coal pillars surround them thicker, like arrows, like poplars, like pines! No cut or break or cornice to give a different direction or reduce the size of the structure! So that everything, the more it rises, the more it would fly and see through.

Gothic arabesqueshould permeate different worlds, and its main function is to connect the earthly with the heavenly, the material with the ideal.Arabesque- this is also movement, Piskunov's whimsical flight through St. Petersburg, his rapid ascent up the stairs, this is his passage through different layers of reality.

Same as Rungearabesqueconnects the worlds of mathematics, music and painting, in Gogol the movement of a whimsical line connects a dream, a mirage, dreams and reality. The German literary critic V. Koshmal once suggested that the name of the artist Chartkov in “ Portrait"refers not so much to hell ( as it is usually considered), but to hell. This observation of Koshmal was developed by Yuri Mann, who pointed out that Gogol's narrative is constantly built on the violation of boundaries, features, edges that separate one world from another, one space from another. When Gogol writes:

“Or is there such a line for a person, to which higher knowledge brings and through which, having stepped, he already steals a person not created by labor, he pulls out something living from the life that animates the original? Why, then, is this passage beyond the line set by the boundary for the imagination so terrible?

He is probably talking aboutarabesquethe movement of the imagination, crossing the boundaries of various semantic spheres. Yuri Mann draws attention to that place "Portrait", where Chartkov talks about how "imagination jumps off its axis with some extraneous push". This action of an external force, according to Mann, explains "puppetry» Gogol's behaviorcharacters , although with no less persuasiveness this " extraneous push» can be interpreted in categories« arabesques» , the free movement of the line of imagination, not controlled by any concept, but therefore, as it were, random.

In this context, Lotman's observations over Gogol's space take on a slightly different meaning. As is known, Lotman believed that Gogol's space is encoded by a theatrical spatial model:

“Gogol, as it were, puts a stage between his narrative and the image of a real event. Reality is first transformed according to the laws of the theater, and then turns into a narrative.

Hence, Gogol's characteristic frame of space, limited by an imaginary ramp and backstage, that is, a frame in Kant's understanding -parergon "ohm. Lotman gives a curious description of such a spatial structure in Gogol's early prose. In the center there is a sharply limited space of everyday action, and outside this space, so to speak on its frame, motifs of infinite distance are drawn, a kind of infinitearabesque, hieroglyph.

“The first (space) is filled with things with a sharply distinguished sign of materiality (food plays a special role), the second - with non-objects: natural and astral phenomena, air, outlinesrelief terrain, mountains, rivers, vegetation.

The peculiarity of these two spaces is their mutual isolation. But this isolation creates an increased tension between them, like the one Derrida wrote about in connection with ergon"oM and parergon "om. Wherein " on the stage» Relative orderliness reigns, and arabesque placed, as it should, on the frame.

The situation, according to Lotman, is changing in " Mirgorod". Now the material order of the scene becomes material chaos:

“... the everyday space of "Evenings..." turns into a fragmented non-space in "Mirgorod". Life passes into chaos (fragmented disorganization of matter). As for the fantasy world, in "Mirgorod" it gives rise to the cosmos - an endless super-organization of space.

This transformation is further consolidated in Petersburg stories". Lotman believes that in stories The everyday world finally turns into a chaotic phantasmagoria. Thus, the confrontation between the two worlds asparergon "a and ergon "adisappears. The frame and the work, though different in the modalities of their fantasy, relate to each other like two dreams. Now the dream becomes a frame for another dream, and so on ad infinitum.Arabesqueturns out to be precisely the striving of the fantastic towards infinity.

The line, the line between the worlds intersects, but the movement continues the same bizarre linearabesques. With Gogol, the materiality of the stage world, of course, from the very beginning was conditional, just as the world subjected to theatrical codification was conditional in general.

Arabesque -(only in female gender - arabesque!) - A piece of music (mainly forpiano) of an elegant character with a whimsical, richly ornamented melodic pattern. The arabesques of R. Schumann, A.K. Lyadov, K. Debussy are well known.

Arabesque in landscape gardening art, it is a flower garden in the form of intricately intertwined lines-paths that create a characteristic pattern against the background of the greenery of a mowed lawn; flower garden in the form of a narrow ( winding) lines on the background of a green lawn.
Arabesque forms an elegant pattern in its combinations; an element of a flower garden of an elaborate floral pattern, to create which ornamental herbaceous plants, molded shrubs and non-vegetative material are used; a type of complex ornament consisting of stylized leaves, flowers, figures, etc.; a small flowerbed of complex shape, resembling leaves, flowers, garlands or wreaths in contour and pattern.

artsy outline arabesques may look like flowers, leaves, animals, or have an abstract form. That is, it is a complicated type of flower bed.

AT landscape artarabesques calledflower bedsin the form of intricately intertwined lines-tracks, creating a characteristicpatternagainst the background of the greenery of a mowed lawn, hence the name: " arabesque flower bed ".

Arabesque(only in masculine gender - arabesque!) one of the main classical dance poses.

At runtime arabesque the body rests on a straightened leg, the other, also straight, stretches back up, one arm is extended forward, the other is laid aside or back, the body is tilted forward, the back is concave, the extended leg and arm balance the body. In the Russian school of classical dance, four types of arabesque are accepted.

What is the meaning of the word "arabesque"? In life, we often come across this concept. This word is often used in accordance with its traditional characteristics, but is used as a figure of speech, as a common noun or in a figurative sense, when it means something cunningly intertwined or intricately ornate, in another version it is very crushed and mixed or very openwork , easy.

What is an arabesque?

The word is of Italian origin. In translation, the term arabesque - arabesco - means "Arabic". However, this ornamental style is used in cultures of different countries and in different types of art. There is no exact and unified definition of an arabesque. We are faced with a completely different use of the concept, it would seem. There are several meanings of what an arabesque is.

Initially, a type of oriental (Arabic) ornament was called an arabesque. In the future, this term began to be used as the name of a certain type of musical piece.

There is another way to use the word - in the masculine gender. What is "arabesque" in this case? In this case, we are talking about a dance movement or a type of dance.

Let's look at each use case of the concept separately.

Arabic pattern in Europe

It is this use of the term that is really associated with its Arabic meaning, as it is a type of ornament that arose in the medieval era in the culture of nomadic Arabs.

What is an arabesque in art? Initially, the structure of the pattern included both geometric and floral motifs, but later only geometric motifs began to be included.

At a later time, text components began to be introduced into the floral pattern. That is why such a concept as "Arabic script" arose - a type of writing whimsically ornate, similar to an arabesque in appearance.

In the heyday of the Middle Ages, the "arabesque" ornament was used to design handwritten books, and in Byzantium and Italy - in majolica and engraving. At this stage in the development of the arabesque, it carried, first of all, a symbolic meaning and was the main element of architectural structures.

The most popular type of ornament "arabesque" became in the Renaissance. Thanks to Giovanni da Udine, the pattern becomes the basis and connecting thread of the semantic component of fresco paintings and decorative and symbolic elements in architecture.

In the era of classicism, the "arabesque" ornament received the appointment of an independent decorative element, abstracted from the semantic component.

Arabic pattern in the countries of the Muslim world

In the Arab world, over time, the arabesque ornament became a whole science that was in the service of the church. After all, Arabic arabesque patterns served as a connecting thread between Heaven - the abode of God and Paradise - and Man as a representative of the Earthly House. If you think about it, then the Underworld, which, according to Muslims, consists of two parts: the grave as the threshold of Paradise or Hell and Hell itself. Thus, it is possible to express the version that the Muslim arabesque can be the image of the "World Tree". Arabesque ornaments can completely cover the walls of the mosque. In the interweaving of their elements, you will never find animals, birds, fish, humans and other living beings, since no one can compete with God - their creator.

Arabesque in the arts and crafts of the East

There is also a non-religious way of using the arabesque ornament in Eastern cultures. One of the most common is the Arabic patterned carpet. In this case, the creation of a pattern implies greater freedom of creativity: images of animals and people can be used as elements, weaving them into a ligature of stems, petals and leaves.

On the basis of the Arabic traditional ornament in the art of carpet weaving, a special direction emerged - Islami - a decorative ornament consisting only of bindweed and spiral elements. In addition, six additional types of Islami are distinguished: "shekasti" - with open ornaments; "bandi" or "vagire" - the elements of the pattern are repeated both horizontally and vertically, and intertwined with each other; "dakhane azhdar", whose arabesques resemble the mouth of a dragon; "toranjdar", in it, along with traditional patterns, such an element as a medallion is used; "lochak-toranj", where a composition of medallions in triangles is placed in the corners of the carpet; "mari" - with spiral-shaped arabesques.

Arabesques in the "bandy" style also have a number of subspecies: "islimi" - in the form of fastened arabesques; "pichak" - in the form of connected weaves; "shekaste" - in the form of untied arabesques; "katibei" - in the form of an associated inscription; "varamin"; "caleb-hashti" in the form of connected square frames; "derakhti" - in the form of intertwining trees; "sarvi" - the main element - cypress; "adamaki" - in the form of a pattern of human figures; "bakhtiyari"; "khushe-anguri" from intertwined bunches of grapes; "shahae gavazne kheyvandar" from linked figurines of deer; "hatame shirazi", reminiscent of inlays; "dastegul" from intertwined bouquets.

In addition to creating unique carpet products, the arabesque motif is used to create models of clothes, dishes, interiors, and even in landscape design.

Pattern creation technology

When creating an "arabesque" ornament, an ideal mathematical calculation is required, which is used to form absolutely accurate compositional elements of its elements and their alternation in an ornamental chain. The elements of the pattern are very complex in composition, often fit into each other. At the same time, it is also necessary to use mathematical knowledge, because the elements of arabesques are difficult to combine variants of various geometric shapes - circles, ovals, rectangles, hexagons and octagons, trapezoids, triangles, rhombuses, etc. Moreover, each type of element has its own color. With such a mathematical pattern, the background is never used for it.

Musical composition

In music, the term "arabesque" was first introduced in relation to a proper name for his work by the famous composer Robert Schumann. Later, the concept of "arabesque" began to be applied to a certain genre of instrumental music, as a rule, a work of small size, but very diverse, light, with an openwork interweaving of elements, rhythms, intonations, tempo, fragments of a melody. The intertwining melody of the arabesque was used in the work of the amazing French impressionist and symbolist composer Claude Debussy. Of the domestic composers, Alexandra Lyadova turned to this genre.

dance movement

What is "arabesque" in dance art? The arabesque, or rather the arabesque, is one of the main movements in classical choreography. In the classification of Agrippina Yakovlevna Vaganova, we meet four types of arabesque, and the Italian choreographer Enrico Cecchetti has five. These movements have a similar setting of the body, head, but differ in the position of the raised and retracted arms and legs.

From classical choreography, the modified arabesque was transferred to sports ballroom dancing and figure skating. It has a fairly long tradition of application in Indian belly dance.

The history of the development of the arabesque in Europe

Muslim arabesque

Arabesque

(French arabesque, from Italian arabesco - Arabic) - a genre of instrumental play. The term "A." in architecture and painting denotes complex patterns in Arabic. style. The term was first applied to music by R. Schumann, who called A. his play for piano. op. 18 (1839) in the form of a rondo with contrasting sections in decomp. rhythms. Since then, the term "A." repeatedly used by composers as a name. short play, ch. arr. for piano, as a rule, of an elegant character, with a patterned texture and richly ornamented, "lace" melodic. pattern. A. op. 4 A.K. Lyadova (1878), like Shumanovskaya, are designed in decomp. rhythms. C. Debussy gave the melodies of his A. (1888) whimsical figurative character. A. for the orchestra was written by E. Wolf-Ferrari.

Musical encyclopedia. - M.: Soviet encyclopedia, Soviet composer. Ed. Yu. V. Keldysha. 1973-1982 .

See what "Arabesque" is in other dictionaries:

ARABESQUE, arabesque, m., and (more often) ARABESQUE, arabesques, f. [fr. arabesque]. 1. Patterned ornament of stylized leaves, flowers, geometric shapes, etc. (originated in imitation of the Arabic style). 2. only pl. Collection of small pieces... Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language

- (French arabesque, literally Arabic), 1) a type of ornament that has developed in Muslim countries and is built on the principle of the endless development of repeating groups (rapports) of geometric, floral or epigraphic motifs, which ... ... Modern Encyclopedia

A piece of music, mainly for the piano, with a whimsical, richly ornamented melodic pattern. The authors of the arabesques: R. Schumann, A. K. Lyadov, K. Debussy and others ...

The European name for the ornament that has developed in the art of Muslim countries. It is built on the principle of endless development and rhythmic repetition of geometric, floral or epigraphic motifs. Differs in multiple rhythmic ... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

ARABESCA, and, genus. pl. juice, female 1. A complex patterned ornament of geometric shapes, stylized leaves [original. in Arabic style] (special). 2. pl. Collection of small literary or musical works (books). | adj. arabesque, oh... Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov

Female sometimes arabesque male. more used pl., artist molded or written decoration, with a belt, a border, from broken and crooked patterned features, flowers, leaves, animals, etc. Arabic numerals, numerical signs, now accepted throughout Europe: 1, 2, 3, etc. ... ... Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary

- (French arabesque, lit. Arabic), the European name for the ornament that has developed in the art of Muslim countries. Built on the principle of endless development of repeating groups (see Rapport) geometric, vegetative or ... ... Art Encyclopedia

I is the European name for the ornament that has developed in the art of Muslim countries. It is built on the principle of endless development and rhythmic repetition of geometric, floral or epigraphic motifs. Differs in multiple rhythmic ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

Arabesque (Arabesque) art style

Arabesque story

the idea of ​​an arabesque is consonant with the ideas of Islamic theologians about the "eternally continuing fabric of the universe." An arabesque is built on the repetition and multiplication of one or more pattern fragments. The endless movement of patterns flowing in a given rhythm can be stopped or continued at any point without violating the integrity of the pattern. Such an ornament actually excludes the background, because. one pattern fits into another, covering the surface (the Europeans called this "fear of the void").

An arabesque can be placed on a surface of any configuration, flat or convex. There is no fundamental difference between the compositions on the wall or on the carpet, on the binding of the manuscript or on ceramics.

Arabesques became widespread in Europe during the Renaissance.

The arabesque is a popular motif of German romanticism, with which Gogol was in a complex and not completely clarified relationship. 96 Gogol himself deliberately built his collection Arabesques as a mixture of heterogeneous material - journalism, aesthetics and prose. In a letter to M.P. Pogodin, he calls the composition of the book "all sorts of things", and in a letter to M.A. Maksimovich - "mess", "a mixture of everything", "porridge"

Arabesques, or grotesques (from the word "grotto"), first attracted attention in connection with the opening of Nero's palace Domus Aurea during the Renaissance. Here, preserved fragments of wall paintings were discovered, in which purely decorative ornamental motifs, connected by a ligature of intricate lines, played a large role. The vignettes, which linked various figurative scenes, gave the wall and ceiling paintings a certain compositional unity.

In the context that interests me, it is of particular importance that the art of arabesque reached its culmination in the work of Raphael, who took his student Giovanni da Udine 98 to the grottoes of Domus Aurea. . And it was to him that Raphael entrusted work on the grotesques in the Vatican loggias.

Technically, "grotesques" made it possible to bring together a large pictorial space, decorated with many heterogeneous images. But it is significant that arabesques are especially attracted to Raphael. On the one hand, of course, they reflected Raphael's evolution towards the mass production of decorative motifs and, accordingly, the need to quickly fill large areas. On the other hand, it was Raphael, with his interest in ideality, who turned out to be an excellent translator of ancient arabesques in the Renaissance. Arabesques did not belong to any space and performed an absolutely non-mimetic role of decorative integration of fragments into a whole. Nicole Dacos writes about the naturalistic tendency of the arabesques of Giovanni da Udine, who more and more filled his ornaments with images of plants, animals and birds. "But these naturalistic, mimetic elements were united by a highly abstract fantasy of arabesques that connected figures that had no intelligible localization Nachahmung here easily turned into Darstellung Pictures from life had an autonomous status, each seemed to be self-sufficient, but at the same time they were not free from the perfect speculation of ornamental lines.

Birds and Udine seem to have nothing to do with arabesques, but without arabesques they have not the slightest justification. It was this strange "connectedness" and "autonomy" of the elements in the arabesques that allowed them to become the basis of the Renaissance allegorical and hieroglyphic. Thus, the arabesque already in the works of the Raphael circle performs the function of mediation between autonomous realistic fragments and pure speculation of lines expressing the freedom of artistic imagination. Critics of the grotesques usually relied on the authority of Vitruvius, who strongly condemned the depiction of "monstrosities instead of the truthful representation of certain things" and argued that the judgment of lovers of the grotesques "is clouded by decadent critical principles"100. Defenders of the grotesques, such as Ligorio and Lomazzo, for example, argued that behind their apparent absurdity lies a hidden allegorical mystical meaning. Ligorio believed that the more incoherent the elements of the grotesques seem and the more connected their weaving, the deeper the general content hidden in them 101. Hence the typical understanding of the grotesques in Neoplatonist terms as intermediate figures of the imagination. It is precisely the grotesques that weave the connection between the worlds, like the “astral amulets” of Neoplatonism, about which Gombrich wrote. It is significant that Luca Signorelli in the Cathedral of Orvieto used grotesques to depict Purgatory 102, that is, precisely the intermediate world, so closely associated with the imagination. It is not surprising, of course, that the grotesques are systematically associated with dreams.

Gogol's Roman experience suggests that the source of his ideas about arabesques was not only German aesthetics, but also the practice of ancient and Renaissance art, in particular Roman. In Germany, interest in arabesques and their discovery during the Renaissance was aroused by Goethe's article "On Arabesques" (1789). The aesthetic development of arabesques received a special impetus in the aesthetics of Kant. In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant distinguished between two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and accompanying beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). Concomitant beauty presupposes the concept of the object and evaluates its perfection in accordance with this concept. Free beauty is independent of the concept of the object. “Flowers are the free beauty of nature. Hardly anyone but a botanist knows what a flower should be,” explains Kant. by themselves mean nothing; they do not depict anything, they do not depict an object subsumed under a certain concept; they are free beauty.”105 As an example of arabesques, Kant speaks of "various kinds of whorls and light regular strokes, similar to the tattoo of the inhabitants of New Zealand"106.

A few pages earlier, Kant writes about "decorations" - parerga - as something that is not included in the idea of ​​​​an object, but is only purely superficially connected with it, "as, for example, picture frames, draperies of statues or a colonnade around a magnificent building" 107. But the adornment does not arouse Kant's approval, since it is "only added" from the outside, like a "gold frame", "is called embellishment and harms true beauty"108. The difference between an arabesque and an ornament lies in the fact that the former is self-sufficient and therefore expresses "free beauty", while the latter is dependent on the subject and attached to it from the outside. As Jacques Derrida noted on this occasion, the frame means nothing, while the arabesque has a desire for meaning: “... here the movement towards meaning and representation has begun: leafy ornament, pure musical improvisation, music without a theme or text, as if they want to say or show something, they have the form of striving towards a certain goal”109.

Jacques Souliou has shown that before the 18th century decoration was not seen as an external addition. For example, in architectural "theory" it was rooted in the aesthetics of orders, which were not at all thought of as some kind of external excess. According to Suliyu, the modern understanding of decoration arises only in the classical era: “Purely decorative betrays the loss of its origin, it has no genealogy, it is orphaned. It thus refers to a complete disconnection from the context. But this is a detachment from the context of a certain type of appearance, namely appearance, which does not have integrity as a form of meaning that we project onto the chaos of reality. The arabesque acts inside the jewelry as an impulse to restore integrity, and therefore meaning. But the arabesque does not go further than the impulse, its meaning remains unclear. Suliyu sees in “decorativeness” a copy of reality as something that has no meaning and, at the same time, reveals the absence of meaning “behind itself”: “Decorative appears under the mask of a double, but there is nothing behind this mask”111. The arabesque is a way of avoiding the radical discovery of this void.

It is this striving for meaning that allows the arabesque to become a hieroglyph, expressing not just free beauty, but precisely divine beauty. Quite in the spirit of this kind of aesthetics, Runge experienced a revelation in which an ordinary ornamental arabesque suddenly becomes a form of mystical discovery of the whole and invisible connections. In a letter to Daniel Runge dated January 30, 1803, he writes that he worked on four paintings of the Four Times of the Day cycle, as on symphonies: “Because in

these four compositions, I have four main ideas and the whole, then I can easily tie them together, using light arabesques. As a simple decoration of rooms, all this, however, is a bit heavy food, but it doesn’t matter - on the basis of such sketches, you can easily get a lot of less difficult sketches, and all this, by the way, is much clearer than I thought at first.

The arabesque must be separated from its traditional place of location - the wall and transferred to another - picturesque space, where it ceases to be an ornament and becomes a free hieroglyph of divine beauty. In March of the same year, Runge showed his drawings to Tik and puzzled him a lot: “... everything that he had never thought of himself as a visible appearance, but only had a presentiment as some kind of general relationship, suddenly appeared visibly before him, turning all his ideas , - that no idea is expressed here, but the connections of mathematics, music and color are visibly drawn with large colors, figures and lines.

The arabesque itself has no meaning, but creates a relationship, unites into a whole various semiotic spheres and conceivable spaces - music, color and mathematics. Runge's remarks are interesting in that they show how ornaments (parerga) are transformed into a hieroglyphic play of form. But this transformation is possible primarily because there is an inextricable link between decoration and work (parergon and ergon). Derrida wrote about decorations like the frame that “it is not just the externality of the excess that turns them into parerga, but the structural connection that pushes them into a gap inside ergon" a. And this gap turns out to be constitutive for ergon "a itself. Without this gaping, ergon would not need parergon"e. Absence in ergon"e is absence of parergon"a"114.

An arabesque is a linear expression of movement from outside inward and inside ergon "a between heterogeneous fragments. This is the only way to introduce aesthetic uniformity into the material chaos of a fragmented world. Friedrich Schlegel, speaking about arabesques 115, compared them with a "sacred breath": "It cannot be seized by force and mechanically, but it can be attracted by mortal beauty and able to penetrate it.<...>This infinite being, his interest is by no means limited to characters, events, situations and individual inclinations; for a true poet, all this, no matter how close it captures his soul, is only a hint of the higher, the infinite, the hieroglyph of the one eternal love and the sacred vital fullness of the creative nature. The hieroglyph in this case becomes an expression of the endless desire for the absolute,

which cannot be stopped and is unable to assume any articulated final form. Hence, ultimately, the meaninglessness of this supreme hieroglyph, which, according to Winfried Menninghaus, “can be read as an attempt to reinvest meaning in desymbolized objects, signs and images through the referential play of reflection in the arabesque”117.

The concept of arabesque in Gogol, from my point of view, reflects not just the heterogeneity of heterogeneous fragments included by the writer in the collection of his works, but also the presence of a movement capable of combining these fragments into a common form.

The model of the arabesque in Gothic 118. An influential text on Gothic was Goethe's essay "On German Architecture" (1773), written as an address to the architect of the Strasbourg Cathedral, Erwin von Steinbach. Here Goethe criticizes the classical architecture of the antiquities type for its fascination with columns and the dominance of large planes, which “the more boldly they rise to the sky, the more they suppress our soul with their unbearable monotony”119. According to Goethe, the solution to the problem was found in the Gothic, which destroys the plane of the wall and is based on organic plant forms that can grow infinitely towards the sky. Goethe believed that in the process of evolution of art, beauty is only a late final formation. The history of art, on the other hand, consists mainly of contradictory clashes, harmonized by the same energy of growth. Goethe emphasizes the importance of growth so much that M. G. Abrame referred this essay by Goethe to the theories of "vegetative genius"120. Goethe writes about the growth of heterogeneous forms as about arabesques from which the totality arises: “So the savage paints with fantastic strokes, frightening figures, paints coconuts, feathers and his body with bright colors. And although the forms of such images are completely arbitrary, art will dispense with the knowledge and observance of proportions, for influx gives it a characteristic integrity. Friedrich Schlegel also saw the integrity of the Gothic in the organic growth inherent in it 122. Schelling compared the same Strasbourg Cathedral, which aroused Goethe's admiration, with a huge plant arabesque 123. In Schelling, the wall as an architectural element disappears altogether, and this is probably due to an attempt to eliminate the aesthetics of appearances, usually taking the form of a canvas or a facade, as in St. Petersburg.

The movement of arabesque lines in a Gothic cathedral is designed to unceasingly turn upwards:

“Lines and corniceless Gothic pilasters, narrowly one after the other, should fly through the entire structure. Woe if they are far apart, if the building does not exceed at least twice its width, if not three times! It then destroyed itself. Elevate it as it should be: so that its walls rise higher, higher, as high as possible, so that countless coal pillars surround them thicker, like arrows, like poplars, like pines! No cut or break or cornice to give a different direction or reduce the size of the structure!<...>So that everything, the more it rises, the more it would fly and see through.

The Gothic arabesque should permeate different worlds, and its main function is to connect the earthly with the heavenly, the material with the ideal. The arabesque is also movement, Piskunov's whimsical flight through St. Petersburg, his rapid ascent up the stairs, his passage through different layers of reality. Just as in Runge the arabesque connects the worlds of mathematics, music and painting, in Gogol the movement of a whimsical line connects a dream, a mirage, dreams and reality. The German literary critic V. Koshmal once suggested that the name of the artist Chartkov in the "Portrait" refers not so much to hell (as is usually believed), but to hell. This observation of Koshmal was developed by Yuri Mann, who pointed out that Gogol's narrative is constantly built on the violation of boundaries, features, edges that separate one world from another, one space from another. When Gogol writes: “Or is there such a line for a person, to which higher knowledge brings and through which, having stepped, he already steals a person not created by labor, he pulls something alive from life that animates the original? Why, then, is this crossing over the boundary line for the imagination so terrible?”125 — he probably speaks precisely of the Arabic movement of the imagination, crossing the boundaries of various semantic spheres126. Yuri Mann draws attention to the place in the Portrait where Chartkov talks about how "imagination jumps off its axis with some kind of extraneous push." This action of an external force, in Mann's opinion, explains the "puppetry" behavior of Gogol's characters, 127 although this "extraneous impulse" can be interpreted with no less persuasiveness in terms of "arabesque", the free movement of the line of imagination, not controlled by any concept, but because would be random.

In this context, Lotman's observations over Gogol's space take on a slightly different meaning. As you know, Lotman believed that Gogol's space is encoded by a theatrical spatial model: “Gogol, as it were, puts a stage between his narrative and the image of a real event. Reality is first transformed according to the laws of the theatre, and then turns into a narrative. Hence, Gogol's characteristic frame of space, limited by an imaginary ramp and backstage, that is, a frame in Kant's understanding - parergon "om. Lotman gives a curious description of such a spatial structure in Gogol's early prose. In the center here is a sharply limited space of everyday action, and outside this space , so to speak, on its frame, motifs of infinite distance are drawn, a kind of endless arabesque, a hieroglyph. “The first [space] is filled with things with a sharply distinguished sign of materiality (food plays a special role), the second - with non-objects: natural and astral phenomena, air , terrain contours, mountains, rivers, vegetation "129. The peculiarity of these two spaces is their mutual isolation 130. But this isolation creates an increased tension between them, like the one Derrida wrote about in connection with ergon "oM and parergon" om. At the same time, relative orderliness reigns “on the stage”, and the arabesque is placed, as it should, but the frame.

The situation, according to Lotman, is changing in Mirgorod. Now the material orderliness of the scene becomes material chaos: “... the everyday space of Evenings... turns into a fragmented non-space in Mirgorod. Life passes into chaos (fragmented disorganization of matter). As for the fantasy world, in "Mirgorod" it gives rise to the cosmos - an infinite super-organization of space"131. This transformation is even more consolidated in the "Petersburg Tales". Lotman believes that in the "stories" the everyday world finally turns into a chaotic phantasmagoria. Thus, the opposition of the two worlds as parergon "a and ergon" a disappears. The frame and the work, though different in the modalities of their fantasy, relate to each other like two dreams. Now the dream becomes a frame for another dream, and so on ad infinitum. The arabesque turns out to be precisely the striving of the fantastic towards infinity.

The line, the line between the worlds intersects, but the same bizarre arabesque line continues to move. With Gogol, the materiality of the stage world, of course, from the very beginning was conditional, just as the world subjected to theatrical codification was conditional in general. But now even this materiality is disappearing. The question arises: what is the function of the romantic hieroglyph if the ontological difference disappears between the worlds that it unites, if, despite all the visible difference, we are talking about the internal homogeneity of spaces? How can Petersburg - this absolute visibility - simulate materiality and heterogeneity? In a world where everything is identical, the opposition between outside and inside, frame and text becomes meaningless. What is the function of the trait that Mann insists on in such a world?

Arabesque representatives

Arabesque work

Design of paintings, development and creation of paintings for interiors, paintings with Swarovski crystals