The Arabesque: Meaning and Transformation of an Ornament

Ernst Kuhnel's The Arabesque, translated by Richard Ettinghausen, is a classic scholarly study of the geometric and vegetal ornament central to Islamic decorative art, written by one of the founding figures of Western Islamic art history. Its authority rests on Kuhnel's deep formal analysis tracing the arabesque's development and its theological association with aniconism across centuries of Islamic architecture and manuscript art. As a mid-twentieth century foundational study, it predates several later art-historical approaches that read ornament through lenses of cognitive science or mathematics rather than only formal and religious history, so its core descriptive and historical work remains valuable while later scholarship has added dimensions, particularly on the underlying geometry, that Kuhnel's own generation did not pursue.