Stucco Decoration Samarra Style

style  A  from the Islamic Museum in Cairo

 style B  View of the entrados of two arches in the mosque of Ibn Toulon

 style C from the Islamic Museum in Cairo

The largest corpus of stucco work from the early Islamic period has been found at the Abbasid capital of Samarra in Iraq. The stucco from this site has been divided into three groups or styles which may represent a chronological development.

 

Style 'A' consists of vine leaves and vegetal forms derived from the Byzantine architecture of Syria-Palestine;  

style 'B' is a more abstract version of this; 

style 'C' is entirely abstract with no recognizable representational forms. 

The first two styles appear to be carved, but the third style was produced by wooden moulds. The Samarra styles are significant as they reappear later in buildings such as the Ibn Tulun Mosque where the soffits of the arches are decorated with style 'B' ornament. After the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate stucco continued to be one of the main forms of decoration and spread throughout the Islamic world to India, Anatolia and Spain.

source: ArchNet