Page "Arabesque (Islamic art)" Paragraph 40

Arabesque is also used as a term for complex freehand pen flourishes in drawing or other graphic media.

The Grove Dictionary of Art will have none of this confusion, and says flatly: " Over the centuries the word has been applied to a wide variety of winding and twining vegetal decoration in art and meandering themes in music, but it properly applies only to Islamic art ", so contradicting the definition of 1888 still found in the Oxford English Dictionary: " A species of mural or surface decoration in colour or low relief, composed in flowing lines of branches, leaves, and scroll-work fancifully intertwined.

Also fig.

As used in Moorish and Arabic decorative art ( from which, almost exclusively, it was known in the Middle Ages ), representations of living creatures were excluded ; but in the arabesques of Raphael, founded on the ancient Græco-Roman work of this kind, and in those of Renaissance decoration, human and animal figures, both natural and grotesque, as well as vases, armour, and objects of art, are freely introduced ; to this the term is now usually applied, the other being distinguished as Moorish Arabesque, or Moresque.