Plastic art on the larger scale therefore seldom fell under outside influences. Thus the Seljuks brought with them from eastern Turkestan a plastic tradition akin to the Buddhist art of central Asia; this tradition is represented by the few extant statues and reliefs of lions, double eagles, dragons, angels, etc., from the city walls of Konia and Baghdad, and by a few stucco plaques depicting scenes of court life. Apart from these, we find human and animal figures in low relief scattered here and there through the decorative carving on rafters and beams of the entire period from the 11th to the 14th century. Under the Mogul emperors in the i6th and 17th centuries Indian influence appears in the elephant-statues of Fatehpur-Sikri and Delhi, and Sassanian influence in the 19th century in the rock reliefs of Fath 'Ali Shah of Persia. Other plastic art, however, is entirely restricted to small-scale works, chiefly figures of lions, elephants and birds in glazed stoneware or bronze, strongly conventionalized as the nature of the material required, and used as water-vessels or smoking appliances; a madonna with Mongolian dress and appear ance, made of faience, is an exception.
Figure-painting is much more important. It is true that it was excluded from public, political and religious edi fices. In the private apartments, however—bathroom and harems especially—painting was tolerated by the clergy, and found its ex pression in frescoes, illustrated erotic and edifying books, and household vessels, goblets, bottles, etc., adorned with figures. Even the caliphs decorated the private apartments in their palaces in this way. Thus between 712 and 715 the Umayyad al-Walid had the bathrooms in his desert castle of Qusair `Amra painted throughout with frescoes in the later antique style, depicting birth and death, the three ages of life, hunters and hunting animals, musicians and dancing-girls, women bathing, the caliph on the throne, the emperors overthrown by Islam, and so on. This latter group betrays the influence of Sassanian art, which dominates the harem frescoes reconstructed out of scanty remnants in the `Ab basid residence at Samarra (836-876). Here we find dancing girls in every possible pose, naked and in flowing robes, with dia dems and long braided hair, with floating veils, bowls and wine jars; huntresses and horse-women, priests and warriors, and ani mals of every kind, in a heraldic style on medallions composed of intertwining tendrils and bands in endless repetition, symmetrical and hieratic. In the Alhambra at Granada (13th-14th cent.) we meet with the last Moors of Spain represented as noble knights and troubadours in roof-paintings of an almost Gothic style ; and in the frescoes and faience tiling of the castles of Isfahan and Ashraf, displaying exquisite calligraphy, and betraying strong Eastern Asiatic influence, we see the amorous and oenophilous sentiment of the courtly youth of the Safawid era. In India, the Mogul rulers of the i6th and 17th centuries had their harem apartments painted throughout with frescoes, though these were discarded about 1700 by the orthodox emperor Aurangzeb; but wall-paintings, some with Buddhist subjects, have been preserved in the bedroom of Akbar's soon-abandoned residence at Fatehpur Sikri, and we know from a few contemporary miniatures the semi European paintings that Jahangir caused to be executed at Agra. (See also PAINTING.) Ornament.—Ornament is the centre of Mohammedan art. It has supplanted all the other possibilities offered by different indi vidual technics. Utilizing them all, dependent on none, it is a self contained world of form, which embraces indifferently the walls of mosques and castles, the backgrounds of figure-paintings, the details of sculpture, glasses, pots and vases, furniture and bronze implements, arms and jewellery, bookbindings and calligraphy, a vast storehouse of forms, turning every technique, every material to its own uses in the most perfect taste. The motifs from which this ornament grew came from the later antique, the ancient East, and the barbarian migrations. In the earliest monuments, par
ticularly the great frieze in relief at Mshatta, the prevailing fea ture, as in Byzantine and Romanesque art, is the spiral tendril springing from the vine, its spaces filled in with vine-leaves and branches of grapes, and diversified with all kinds of animals and large rosettes. In the frescoes and in the "third style" of the stucco wall-facings in the 'Abbasid residence at Samarra we find the same motif, though already again greatly conventionalized. Beside it, however, we encounter a new type of ornament un doubtedly traceable to the wood-carving of the nomad tribes of the north, consisting of very denatured palm-leaves, whose con tours soon became an independent style, a complex of free curves. Under the Turks and the Arab dynasties that took their artistic notions from them (loth to 16th century), this developed into a purely abstract art of decoration, carried to the furthest possible extent ; its leading motifs are the fillet, the arabesque and the palm-leaf. The first is the most important and is derived from the northern nomadic art. Plain or twisted, with herring-bone or circular patterns, it divides every area into border and central field, angle and centre medallions, friezes, etc. It curves into circles and wavy lines, imitates the shapes of architectural vaults, piles up tendril-wise in vaulted arcades and forms complicated trellis pat terns. This developed into the twined pattern of stars and rosettes favoured during the Mameluke period, which presents designs which, immensely numerous though they are, are always mathe matically accurate. The intervening spaces are filled with poly gons of every shape, stars, garlands, rosettes, of ten plain or in simple patterns that secure their whole effect through colour contrast, and frequently decorated with rich arabesques diversified with palm-leaf motifs. The early twining vine-leaf, the palm-leaf, the "tree of life" of the ancient east, are combined in an inextric able dramatic unity, enriched since the Mongol period with com pleted palm-leaves and even with distortions of these into dia bolical masks, houses, etc., and Chinese cloud-strata and shreds. Thus western Asia, especially Persia, was dominated by the ara besque, in delicate spirals, often of the shape of snail-shells, with little rolled-up and not uncommonly pinnate leaves, and rosettes, and palm-leaves radiating outwards. It served also as a back ground for decorative figures of phoenixes and Chinese dragons, hunting animals and birds, musicians and dancing-girls, but most of all for ornamental inscriptions. The clumsy early Arabic script, the "Kufic," with its numerous vertical and oblique strokes, pro duced an extraordinarily monumental effect, and for that reason, it continued to be employed as a decorative writing, and developed into a new form, used with special frequency in Persia—the "floral" Kufic, in which the top of the characters blossom into floral tendrils. This was also combined with the trellis ornament, a notable example being the stucco-work in the Alhambra at Gra nada. The later cursive naskhi, with its wealth of curves and twists, also proved a highly decorative script, the final letters of words being generally crossed with the long strokes of the initial letters like an ornament. They were also frequently used to pro vide a delicate background to the heavier characters of the Kufic. The s/iikasta, and the animal figures which were artfully formed from the characters of some sentences (generally from the first sure of the Koran) were confined, however, to the Per sian book-designer's art. After the 16th century Mohammedan ornament began to decay. As early as the 13th century niches framed by arches and pillars, vases with bouquets of flowers, hanging lamps, cypresses, etc., had appeared sporadically; these now came into favour as decorative motifs, and their semi naturalism drove out the wealth of abstract ornament.