Pseudo-Arabic script on biblical figures marked them as oriental, not fashionable

Evidence

Pseudo-Arabic writing is the result of the artist inventing a nonsensical script that is expected to be read as Arabic. Art historians have traditionally been happy to accept the illusion as reality. For example, an early twentieth-century scholar described the pseudo-Arabic script on the armor of Verrocchio’s David (1473–75, fig. 5) as “Arabic letters, so popular a decoration at that time.” But if the motif was “so popular” then why is it not found more often in contemporary secular portraiture? More important, why is it never found on the garments of Jesus? As we shall see, only a certain type of Israelite, and never Jesus, was portrayed wearing oriental clothing or headdress. Evidently, the role of the fake Arabic script, like of the turban, was to mark a personage as oriental, rather than as a fancier of exotic fashions. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 173

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how visual codes encode religious-ethnic classification, e.g. the Complaints About Immodesty article’s logic of dress as political signaling.