c. 600–900

Insular art

In the monasteries of Ireland, Scotland and northern England, between about 600 and 900, monks created a book art of breathtaking density. They turned the Gospels into pages of spirals, interlace and intertwined beasts, and carried this art deep into the Continent.

One word, a whole page

In Matthew’s Gospel the Christmas story opens with the words “Christi autem generatio”, now the birth of Christ was on this wise. In the Book of Kells the monks spelled out just one word for it, “Christi”, abbreviated to the Greek letters Chi and Rho, and those two letters fill an entire page. The X swings across the vellum in huge arcs, crammed with spirals that turn into ever smaller spirals, with interlace, angels and human heads. Look long enough and you find, along the bottom edge, cats and mice squabbling over a round communion wafer. Only at the lower right, in plain script, do the words “h generatio” follow.

The Chi-Rho page is the most famous page of Insular illumination, perhaps of the entire Middle Ages. The Book of Kells was made around 800; today it is kept in the library of Trinity College Dublin, where two of its pages are on view at a time.

Art from the islands

“Insular” refers to the islands where this art was made: Britain and Ireland. From the fifth century missionaries such as Patrick had brought Christianity to Ireland, and a church grew up whose centres were monasteries rather than bishops’ cities. In 563 the Irish monk Columba, Colum Cille in Irish, founded a monastery on the small Scottish island of Iona. From there, in 635, Lindisfarne was founded on the coast of Northumbria.

In these monasteries three visual worlds met: the abstract spirals and whorls of Celtic art, the interlaced animal patterns of Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths, and the books and image types of the Mediterranean world brought by missionaries from Rome. What came of it was something entirely new.

Carpets of vellum

The monks copied the Gospels word for word on vellum made from calfskin; a large book needed the hides of more than a hundred animals. Before each Gospel they placed pages without text, filled entirely with ornament, now called carpet pages because they recall oriental rugs. Often a cross lies hidden in them. Then come huge initials, out of which the text only slowly emerges.

The Lindisfarne Gospels, made around 700 to 720, show this art at its height. According to a note added around 950 by a priest called Aldred, they were written and decorated by Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne, “for God and Saint Cuthbert”. Aldred also wrote a translation between the Latin lines, which is regarded as the oldest surviving version of the Gospels in English.

The people and animals in these books are not copies of nature. In the Echternach Gospels of around 690, Mark’s lion is a pattern of arcs, and the Evangelists gaze out with almond eyes from flat robes. The images were meant not to show the world but to adorn the word of God and to guard it.

Gold for the altar

The same visual language appears in metal. The Ardagh Chalice, found in a potato field in Ireland in 1868, is made of silver decorated with gold filigree, enamel and cast glass. The Tara Brooch, a cloak pin of gilded silver, carries filigree so fine in its tiny fields that it can only be made out with a magnifying glass, even on the back, which no one saw when it was worn. Both date from the eighth century and are now in the National Museum of Ireland.

The Vikings arrive

In 793 Vikings attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne. Contemporaries were horrified, for a monastery was considered holy ground. Iona was raided in 795, 802 and 806; in the last attack the raiders killed 68 monks, and part of the community withdrew to Kells in Ireland. The usual account holds that the monks began the Book of Kells on Iona and finished it at Kells. That is not certain: in 2025 the historian Victoria Whitworth suggested that the book may have been made at the monastery of Portmahomack in Pictish eastern Scotland, where archaeologists found a workshop for vellum. The question remains open.

The Book of Kells itself was lucky. Early in the eleventh century it was stolen from the church at Kells; it was found a few months later, but without its golden cover. In 1661 it came to Trinity College.

On the Continent

Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks also went to mainland Europe as missionaries and teachers. Columbanus founded monasteries in France and Italy, and his companion Gallus gave St. Gallen its name. The Northumbrian Willibrord founded Echternach, in present-day Luxembourg, in 698 and probably brought with him the Gospel book later named after it. A scriptorium working in the Insular style grew up there. The Abbey Library of St. Gallen still holds Irish manuscripts from the eighth century.

This is how Insular art reached the court of Charlemagne, where it merged with a new enthusiasm for antiquity. The great decorated initials of Romanesque books have their roots here.

Why it still matters

When the Celtic Revival rediscovered Ireland’s past in the nineteenth century, the patterns of Kells and Lindisfarne became symbols of Irish identity, on gravestones, jewellery and banknotes. They still turn up on tattoos and pub signs today. Yet anyone standing before the Chi-Rho page sees something else: an art that turned patience into devotion, in which every line, however small, was drawn for God.