| Perfect workmanship. |
Perfect workmanship.No words can describe the intricate delicacy of the ornamentation of this book, lavishly decorated as it is with all the different varieties of pattern mentioned above, the most remarkable among them being the ingeniously intricate patterns formed by interlaced and knotted lines of colour, plaited in and out, with such amazingly complicated lines of interlacement that one cannot look at the page without astonishment at the combined taste, patience, unfaltering certainty of touch and imaginative ingenuity of the artist. The wonderful minuteness of the work, examined through a microscope, fills one with wonder at the apparently superhuman eyesight of the scribe.
| Complex interlacings. |
Complex interlacings.With regard to the intricate interlaced ornaments in which (with the aid of a lens) each line can be followed out in its windings and never found to break off or lead to an impossible loop of knotting, it is evident that the artist must have enjoyed, not only an aesthetic pleasure in the invention of his pattern, but must also have had a distinct intellectual enjoyment in his work, such as a skilful mathematician feels in the working out of a complicated geometrical problem.
| Microscopic intricacy. |
Microscopic intricacy.The combined skill of eye and hand shown in the minute plaits of the Book of Kells places it among the most wonderful examples of human workmanship that the world has ever produced. By the aid of a microscope Mr Westwood counted in the space of one inch no less than 158 interlacements of bands or ribands, each composed of a strip of white bordered on both sides with a black line.
Giraldus Cambrensis, who visited Ireland in 1185 as secretary to Prince John, writes in the most enthusiastic language of the splendour of a similar manuscript of the Gospels which he saw in Kildare Cathedral. It shows, he says, superhuman skill, worthy of angels' hands, and he was lost in wondering admiration at the sight.
| Copies of jewellery. Primitive spiral patterns. |
Copies of jewellery.One class of ornament in the Book of Kells and in other manuscripts of this class consists of bands or diapers formed with step-like lines enclosing small spaces of brilliant colour. It is this class of pattern which is derived from the cloisonné inlay with bits of transparent carbuncle used in gold jewellery. Other ornaments consist of various spiral forms derived from the application of gold wire to flat surfaces of gold, a class of pattern which appears to have come, as it were, naturally to the gold-workers of many different periods and countries. Primitive spiral patterns.Many of these spiral designs in the Irish manuscripts are almost identical with forms which occur so frequently among the gold ornaments of the Greek "Mycenean period," one among many examples in the art history of the world, which show the remarkable sameness of invention in the human mind at a certain stage of development whatever the time or the place may be[[62]].
It should moreover be noticed that this close imitation of metal-work is not limited to the separate details of the manuscripts. The main lines and divisions of the decoration on whole pages are accurately copied from the enamelled and jewelled gold or silver covers in which these precious Gospels were bound. Thus, the same design might appear in delicate goldsmiths' work on the covers of a Textus, and also might be seen represented by the illuminator in brilliant colours on a page within.