| Abstrakt: |
This essay focuses on the perception of Arabic writing in Italian art between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, mostly through an analysis of the peculiar phenomenon known as pseudoscript. This pseudoscript seems to imitate and evoke the Arabic alphabet in terms of formal features, but it is often unintelligible in terms of content. I will discuss five case studies of illegible script in specific association with their text field: on thresholds, on hems and borders of luxurious garments, around sacred figures, in marginal areas, and on frames. I will demonstrate that, far from being simply "all Arabic," script could retain very different nuances of meaning and function, depending on whether it was considered in terms of its shape, its constituting material, or where it appeared. Even the notion of illegibility was consciously manipulated to suggest different levels of secrecy of the message: obscure as magical writing, secretive as the power of the monarch, intimate as a prayer in one's heart, marginal as an artist's mark, and mysterious as a riddle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
