ation, and has
really nothing in common with it except the mere symmetrical principles
of its arrangement. Pliny and Vitruvius give us no name for the
extravagant decorative wall-painting in vogue in their time, to which
the early Italian revivers of it seem to have given the designation of
grotesque, because it, was first discovered in the arched or underground
chambers (_grotte_) of Roman ruins--as in the golden house of Nero, or
the baths of Titus. What really took place in the Italian revival was in
some measure a supplanting of the Arabesque for the classical grotesque,
still retaining the original Arabian designation, while the genuine
Arabian art, the Saracenic, was distinguished as Moresque or Moorish. So
it is now the original Arabesque that is called by its specific names of
Saracenic, Moorish and Alhambresque, while the term Arabesque is applied
exclusively to the style developed from the debased classical grotesque
of the Roman empire.

There is still much of the genuine Saracenic element in Renaissance
Arabesques, especially in that selected for book-borders and for
silver-work, the details of which consist largely of the conventional
Saracenic foliations. But the Arabesque developed in the Italian
cinquecento work repudiated all the original Arabian elements and
devices, and limited itself to the manipulating of the classical
elements, of which the most prominent feature is ever the floriated or
foliated scroll; and it is in this cinquecento decoration, whether in
sculpture or in painting, that _Arabesque_ has been perfected.

In the Saracenic, as the elder sister of the two styles, which was
ingeniously developed by the Byzantine Greek artists for their Arabian
masters in the early times of Mahommedan conquest, every natural object
was proscribed; the artists were, therefore, reduced to making
symmetrical designs from forms which should have no positive meaning;
yet the Byzantine Greeks, who were Christians, managed to work even
their own ecclesiastical symbols, in a disguised manner, into their
tracery and diapers; as the lily, for instance. The cross was not so
introduced; this, of course, was inadmissible; but neither was the
crescent ever introduced into any of this early work in Damascus or
Cairo. The crescent was itself not a Mahommedan device till after the
conquest of Constantinople in 1453 A.D. The crescent, as the new moon,
was the symbol of Byzantium; and it was only after that capital of the