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Arabesque.
Distinctive kind of vegetal ornament that flourished in Islamic art from the 10th to the 15th century. The term ‘arabesque’ (and the obsolete form rebesk, It. rebesco) is a European, not an Arabic, word dating perhaps to the 15th or 16th century, when Renaissance artists used Islamic designs for book ornament and decorative bookbindings. 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.
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