Islamic Ornament
Islam forbade depicting a human being or any other living creature, which contributed to the active development of geometric and plant ornaments. Masters began to invent all kinds of intricate color and compositional combinations.
There are two styles in Islamic ornamentation: geometric (girikh) and vegetal (islimi).
Girih (Pers.) – a knot, it is a complex geometric ornament, composed of stylized rectangular and polygonal shapes of lines. In most cases it is used for the external decoration of mosques and books in a large edition.
Islimi (Pers.) – a type of ornament based on a combination of a tuft and a spiral. It embodies in a stylized or naturalistic form of the idea of a continuously evolving flowering leafy shoots, and includes an infinite variety of options. It is most common in clothing, books, the interior decoration of mosques, and tableware. For the most part, these styles are used separately, but they can also be combined when all the cells of a large geometric network of girih tightly fill the elastic small wreaths of plant whorls.
One of the peculiarities of Arabic decor is “carpet” ornamentation, where the pattern covers the entire surface of an object or a structure according to the principle of “horreur vacui” (fear of emptiness).
In Islamic decor almost always there are brief inscriptions – proverbs, benevolent sayings from Islam, aphorisms, etc. Of plants, most often there are flowers of tulips, carnations, hyacinths, amaryllis, shoots of climbing plants, etc., depicted in natural or stylized form.
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