a. and sb. Also 8 arabesk. [a. F. arabesque Arabian; cf. It. rabesco (Florio, 1611), and earlier REBESK.]
A. adj. 1. Arabian, Arabic.
1842. Encycl. Brit., II. 693/1. The inglorious obscurity in which the Arabesque doctors have in general slumbered.
2. esp. Arabian or Moorish in ornamental design; carved or painted in arabesque (see B 2).
[1611. Cotgr., Arabesque, Rebeske worke; a small, and curious flourishing.]
1656. Blount, Glossogr., Arabesque, Rebesk work; branched work in painting or in Tapestry.
1779. H. Swinburne, Trav. Spain, xxxi. 253 (1.) Armorial ensigns of Castille and Leon, interwoven with the Arabesque foliages.
1849. Freeman, Archit., 282. A sort of arabesque pattern with festoons of fruit and flowers.
3. fig. Strangely mixed, fantastic.
1848. Dickens, Dombey (C. D. ed.), 105. Surrounded by this arabesque work of his musing fancy.
1863. Mrs. C. Clarke, Shaks. Char., xvi. 411. Launcelot is a sort of ‘arabesque’ character.
B. sb. [the adj. used absol.]
† 1. The vulgar Arabic language. Obs.
1770. W. Guthrie, Geogr., Egypt (N.). The Arabick, or Arabesque, as it is called, is still the current language.
1796. Morse, Amer. Geog., II. 580. The vulgar language … is the Arabesk, or corrupt Arabian.
2. A species of mural or surface decoration in color 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 Renascence decoration, human and animal figures, both natural and grotesque, as well as vases, armor, and objects of art, are freely introduced; to this the term is now usually applied, the other being distinguished as Moorish Arabesque, or Moresque.
1786. trans. Beckford’s Vathek (1868), 66. Could … paint upon vellum the most elegant arabesques that fancy could devise.
1827. Carlyle, Misc. (1857), I. 14. His manner of writing is—a wild complicated Arabesque.
1844. Disraeli, Coningsby, I. iii. 16. A vestibule, painted in arabesque.
1868. Chambers’s Encycl., I. 344. The arabesques with which Raphael adorned the galleries of the Vatican, and which he is said to have imitated from those which he had been instrumental in discovering in the baths of Titus, are at once the most famous and the most beautiful which the modern world has produced.
1880. Longf., My Cathedr., 5. Not Art but Nature … carved this graceful arabesque of vines.
3. The figure described by the leading lines of the composition, in a drawing or painting.
1883. W. Armstrong, in Eng. Illus. Mag., 155/1. The same qualities, but with more freedom and a finer arabesque.
