A Secret Ornamental Language

February 15, 2023 1:32 AM

"Have you ever noticed decorative borders in certain Byzantine or Renaissance paintings that don't seem to make any sense? Beautiful, calligraphic, gibberish... ?" The Ornamentalist looks at "pseudo-Kufic" script, "a style of decoration used during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, consisting of imitations of the Arabic Kufic script, or sometimes Arabic cursive script, made in a non-Arabic context." (Wikipedia) via (mefi's own) Theophile Escargot, [e-mail].
posted by taz (11 comments total)

Fascinating stuff. Do read the comments. Also, it's evidence that Renaissance people had at least some idea that biblical people weren't exactly wearing contemporary Renaissance clothing.

Do read the comments. There was some (fake?) Hebrew too.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:31 AM on February 15, 2023

It's the Chinese calligraphy tattoo of the Renaissance.
posted by clawsoon at 4:46 AM on February 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Exoticism has always been with us, it seems.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:53 AM on February 15, 2023

Amazing blog! Amazing post! Thanks for posting!
posted by mumimor at 5:05 AM on February 15, 2023

I find asemic writing really fascinating. My favorite examples are in kids' cartoons, when the characters are reading books and there's either gibberish with regular characters, lines to indicate texts or completely made up scripts. Here's a compilation of such scenes from Sarah and Duck, which mostly shows text as lines. I remember Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood having a particularly beautiful made-up asemic script, but I can't find any examples online.
posted by Kattullus at 5:30 AM on February 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

The modern analogue: when StableDiffusion etc. (that is, AI image generation) uses pseudo-language to fill up a space in an image that it thinks should have text. From a distance, it looks fine. But if you look close, it's gibberish that resembles letters, Chinese characters, etc., because the AI is trained on images and doesn't really understand text.
posted by jabah at 6:06 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Cool, but I'm also taken with the Giotto Madonna's expression; a bit of a sneer, like, "Oh yeah? You wanna go? Bring it if you think you're hard enough, then."
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:35 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

but I'm also taken with the Giotto Madonna's expression; a bit of a sneer,

I read that not so much a sneer as the dismayed confusion of a young virgin visited by the angel Gabriel who brings to her the tidings that she will give birth to the messiah, only to nine months later bring forth what appears to be a 38-year-old golf pro named Gary.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:06 AM on February 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

Wow this is fantastic. I love Kufic calligraphy, ever since having learned about it visiting Alhambra. Such a beautiful writing form. I've often wondered why something like it hasn't been adopted more in European art. I guess it was!
posted by Nelson at 7:39 AM on February 15, 2023

Another example of this kind of thing is the coinage of the Parthian Empire. The Parthians conquered the territory ruled by the Greek-speaking Seleucids, who had issued silver coins stamped with Greek names and titles. The early Parthian coinage is also stamped with Greek text, but over the centuries of Parthian rule, the text, presumably copied from one issue of coinage to the next by craftsmen who could no longer read Greek, gradually blurs into unreadable vaguely Grecian letterforms.
posted by cyanistes at 8:22 AM on February 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

It's the Chinese calligraphy tattoo of the Renaissance.

Or the wonton font....
posted by Rash at 2:42 PM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]