Women and the Vegetable Kingdom: Love Metaphors in Christian and Islamic Medieval Poetics

Abstract

Despite the antinomic character originally attributed to the concept of grotesque and arabesque which, according to historical periods and individual interpretations, has surprisingly shifted from opposition to juxtaposition of the two terms, such a cultural parameter can still offer the opportunity of tracing a credible dividing line between the creativity of the West and that of the Middle East. A limited number of vegetable and floral metaphors connected to images of female personae are taken into consideration under the grotesque/arabesque guidelines, from Petrarch and his metaphor Laura = laurel to masters of poetic mannerism in Arabic literature such as Ibn al-Rumi, al-Sanawbarī, al-Mutamid and others. The major distinction arising from this display of poetic virtuosity points in the direction of the well known prohibition, in Islamic arts, of human representations which, for this reason, are bound to undergo a metamorphosis from the human to the vegetable kingdom, thereby justifying the principle of foliated/floriated motifs in the arabesque and its transfer to kilim-related designs and ornaments. On the other hand, the origin of the Petrarchan floral metaphor, stylistically related to Arnaut Daniel, seems to reside more squarely in the sense of psychological and historical conflicts inherited by the West from Greek and Latin literary topoi.