The monks who made it practised the Insular style found in Ireland and Northumbria between 600 and 800, an aesthetic of decorative profusion, intertwining animals, angels, word and image. The Book of Kells is universally recognised as the greatest example of medieval illumination to be produced before AD1000. Illumination - the visual elaboration of letters and words, as well as the visualisation of scenes and persons in a rich system of decoration - served complex purposes, from providing the illiterate laypeople with access to the book, to entertaining the copyists themselves and making interpretive connections.
Book of kells manual#
Medieval monasteries reproduced scripture, theological writings and chronicles through manual copying and illustration. At any rate, it was in Kells that the book was first documented. Nothing is certain about this enigmatic masterpiece of early medieval illumination it could have been produced at Kells, County Meath, back in Ireland, where the Iona community founded an alternate base in 807 as a sanctuary from Viking raids.
Artist: "The most precious object in the western world", as the Book of Kells was described by the Annals of Ulster about 200 years after its creation, is the work of unnamed Irish monks labouring probably on Iona, off western Scotland, where St Colum Cille - St Columba - founded a monastery in the sixth century.
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