was converted by Irish missionaries, the new Christians copied the Irish writing, so well, indeed, that the earliest specimens extant can hardly be distinguished from the beautiful penmanship of the Irish. The Book of Durham, generally called the Lindisfarne Gospels, of about 700, is an exquisite Northumbrian example of the Irish round hand, in the characteristic broad, heavy-stroke letters. Another good specimen of this style is the eighth century manuscript of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, in Cambridge University Library.
Irish illumination is as characteristic as the writing. Pictures and drawings of the human figure are not so common as in the work of other schools, and when they do appear are not often good. Still, some of them, as the scenes from the life of Christ in the Book of Kells, are quite unlike the illuminations of any other school; while the portraits of the Evangelists in the same book, in the Book of MacRegol, and in the Lindisfarne Gospels, are singularly interesting. Floral work is also rare. But in geometrical ornament, beautifully symmetrical—diagonal patterns, zigzags, waves, lozenges, divergent spirals, intertwisted and interwoven ribbon and cord work—and in grotesque zoological forms,—lizards, snakes, hounds, birds, and dragons’ heads,—the Irish school attained their highest artistic development. Their art is striking, not for originality, not for its beauty, which is nevertheless great, but for painstaking. Knowing but one style of making a book beautiful, they lavished much time and loving care to achieve their end. The detail is extraordinarily minute and complicated. “I have counted,” writes Professor Westwood, “[with a magnifying glass] in a small space scarcely three-quarters of an inch in length by less than half an inch in width, in the Book of Armagh, no less than 158 interlacements of a slender ribbon pattern formed of white lines edged with black ones.” But, this intricacy notwithstanding, the designs as a whole are usually bold and effective. In the best kind of Irish illumination gold and silver are not used, but the colours are varied and brilliant, and are employed with taste and discretion; while the occasional staining of a leaf of vellum with a fine purple sometimes adds beauty and much distinction to an excellent design.
Of intricate geometrical ornament and grotesque figures, the illumination representing the symbols of the Four Evangelists (fo. 290) of the Book of Kells is perhaps the best example. Of divergent spirals and interlaced ribbon work the frontispiece of St. Jerome’s Epistle in the Book of Durrow affords notable examples. Two of the peculiar features of Irish decoration—the rows of red dots round a design and the dragon’s head—appear in the earliest, or nearly the earliest, Irish manuscript extant, namely, the Cathach Psalter, now in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. Whether the essential and peculiar features of this ornamentation are purely indigenous, as Professor Westwood contends, or whether they are of Gallo-Roman origin, as Fleury argues, is a moot point, calling for complicated discussion which would be out of place here.