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Celtic Art - From Tribal Jewellery to Sacred Text
Although straight line designs, including step patterns and key patterns, had been around since far into prehistory, Celtic art is particularly famous for its use of curves - knotwork, spirals, zoomorphs (animal patterns) and so on. In the La Tène style, at the height of pagan Celtic culture, the emphasis was very much on the sweeping curves that were to be echoed by the Art Nouveau movement two thousand years later. There are still people who believe, like Freidenreich Hundertwasser, that 'the straight line is the downfall of western civilisation'.
So the Christian artists and scribes behind the great manuscripts were the inheritors of over a thousand years of artistic endeavour. Pagan Celtic civilisation had a history of outstanding examples of metalwork, jewellery, stone carvings and other artefacts, and the scribes built on this visual language to create the great illuminated manuscripts. It is also interesting to note that the dramatic development of Celtic art in the two-dimensional manuscripts comes from a background which was predominantly three-dimensional - carving in stone and wood, and metalwork casting. (It is difficult to be certain that Pagan-era celts did not create two-dimensional works of art on flat walls or parchment, but no little or no evidence of such work survives.)
Indeed, the best term we have for describing the technique used by the celts for their decoration, both in the Pagan and Christian eras, comes from jeweller's terminology - cloisonné, meaning raised lines filled with solid colour. There was no shading of the colours, just areas to be filled with solid pigment, like colouring books today.
The early Celtic monasteries were very basic, but rapidly gained a reputation as centres of teaching. The Irish love of learning encouraged the spread of the monasteries, and many of the aes dana (men of art) who would previously have attached themselves to a tribal king, now went instead to the monasteries. It took a couple of centuries of growth for the church to establish itself and its art before the production of the great manuscripts, but this period (400-700 AD) produced many prototypes in various different media: bronze objects, some enamelled, in styles varying from late Haalstatt to intricate La Tène.
From this period comes the Cathach, the earliest surviving Irish gospel book, said to have been written by St. Columba himself. Although the Cathach is not illuminated, is an obvious precursor to the later manuscripts. It must be remembered that many works of art were done in materials that have not survived the passing of time. The traditional shape of the Celtic cross, with the circle around the centre, is thought to have come from earlier wooden crosses, where the arms had to be supported with cross beams. These were then attached to the upright and the arms with ropes or nails, and these later became the circular 'bosses' that are evident on the classic celtic crosses.
There are also reasons to believe that Celtic art was developing on fabric, as there are a few fabric artefacts from this period. The other great medium for the earlier Pagan artists was boduy-painting, but it is unlikely that this self-adornment persisted in the more aescetic value-system of the Christian-era.
Celtic illuminated manuscripts use a unique combination of decorative styles. The illuminators seemed to have a complete disregard for realism and a deep understanding of geometrical ornament. While the Classical and the Byzantine styles were both mainly pictorial, the Celtic is purely ornamental: all representative art in Celtic manuscripts is borrowed fairly directly from the Byzantine style, probably copied from examples in the monasteries' libraries. In a sense, it is surprising that the monks did not just copy the style as well as the text of their original manuscripts, but from the evidence that we have, it appears that the first missionaries brought with them simple, undecorated texts. It seems likely that the scribes were inspired by the later books brought from the East, but decided to use the celtic style, which had been developing for a thousand years, and which presumably surrounded them in their everyday lives.
The rigid geometric borders and letters of the illuminated pages enclose, and are often made up by, endlessly twisting lines and intertwined creatures. These lines and creatures in turn are based on a fairly rigid geometry, though here it is mainly circular rather than rectangular. Yet close examination of the finest detail - the 'horns' of the serpents, the 'topknots' of the birds, the beards and hair of the human figures - shows that this work is all done freehand. If the creature is part of a repeat pattern, these fine details are hardly ever repeated exactly, but will vary from each other in some way. This is where the artists showed their creativity away from the compass and ruler.
It is not hard to see a link between the periods spent in isolation on the shores of the Atlantic and the North Sea and the increasing amount of bird imagery in the illuminated manuscripts coming from Iona and Lindisfarne. The monastery of Lindisfarne, where Eadfrith and Ethelwald were bishops, was founded in or about AD 635 on a small outcrop of land now known as Holy Island. It lies among the sands about a mile off the Northumberland coast, twelve miles south of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Celtic Christians thrived on the written word. Their sources included not just the bible and the commentaries and epistles of saints and popes, but also the earlier 'pagan' texts such as Plato, Aristotle etc - texts which were banned in much of Rome-dominated Christiandom, but which were known and studied in the Coptic and Byzantine centres.
Most, if not all, monasteries had a scriptorium, devoted to the copying of these texts for use in the monastery and for distribution to others. The copies were sent out to other monasteries, and further copies made, which led to an increasing number of errors and omissions. This not only led to the changing of the text of the Bible, but to other anomalies - for instance, the Book of Kells contains the Eusebian canons, but there are no numbers in the text to which to relate them.
Talented scribes and illuminators were held in very high esteem, and Saint Columba, founder of Iona, was particularly noted for his activities as a scribe. The De Abbaticus includes an account of an Irish monk called Ultan, whose hand, which "once used to write the Lord's word", performed a miraculous cure as his bones were being raised from their original resting place. We even know the names of several of the scribes and illustrators who were so respected in the Celtic world that they were often rewarded by ecclesiastical rank. One such was Mac Reguil, the ninth century scribe and abbot of Birr, and one of his magnificent Gospel books is preserved in the Bodlean Library, Oxford.
The number of manuscripts left to us today is very small compared to the number that originally existed. We know this because of contemporary accounts of the large libraries held by the celtic monasteries, as well as accounts of their destruction by Viking and later Christians in various reformation purges.
The Christian manuscripts were usually written on vellum, and bound together using wooden boards coated in animal hide.
Although the manuscripts themselves were written on vellum, it is fairly certain that the illuminators used wax tablets for sketching and working out their designs. There are contemporary references to them and illustrations in later manuscripts, but hardly any have been found in archaeological digs. By their very nature, being made of wood and wax, they are easily destroyed by fire and time, and they would in any case have been extensively recycled. There are rather more examples of the bone and wood styli (plural of stylus) used for engraving on the wax. The tablets would also have been used by novices to practice their writing. The native monks came from an oral tradition, with no real written language, and a novice would have to prove his worth on reusable wax before being allowed to work on valuable vellum.
One single leather book binding made in Northumbria in this era (c.700 AD) has survived, the earliest European binding still associated with the manuscript for which it was made. This is the binding of the Durham Gospel, which is at present on loan to the British Library, was probably a gift to Lindisfarne in honour of the elevation of Saint Cuthbert. The binding is of crimson goatskin over beechwood boards, and the raised decoration on the front cover is moulded over cords. We can only assume from this and the scarce historical records that this was the usual method of binding.
The script most characteristic of the Wearmouth-Jarrow scriptorium was uncial, a formal script which first appeared in the fourth century, and which used only capital letters, The designs of these letters had been developed in the Roman Empire during the fourth century, and were used for writing books. The manuscripts brought to England by Saint Augustine and his followers, and those collected later by Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrith provided English scribes with many fine models for this script. So well did the scribes learn to copy it that the surviving masterpiece from Wearmouth-Jarrow, the huge Codex Amiatinus which is now in Florence, was only recognised as the work of Northumbrian scribes in the last century after much disagreement among scholars.
The half uncial or insular majuscule script was developed in early Christian Ireland and spread eastward through Scotland, England and the celtic monasteries in mainland Europe. It is used in many of the manuscripts, notably the books of Lindisfarne and Durrow. As its names suggest, it was similar to the uncial capital script, but included several variations on letter shapes which are closer to modern lower case letters. It was written with fairly broad nibs held parallel to the double guide lines ruled on the page. The result is a well-balanced script that is both easier to read, and quicker to write, than the older Uncial style.
The Irish developed a third script which, being a cursive script was even faster to write, though to our eyes it is much harder to read. As it was a later development it is only found in the manuscripts in the form of the glosses (notes) written in the margins and between the lines of text years (sometimes centuries) after the manuscripts were first made. It included extra letters for a 'w' and two 'th' sounds, one of which looked very like the modern 'y', giving us the inane 'ye' for 'the'.
According to legend the Gaelic script was developed within a week from the Latin in the seventh century by Cenn Faelad, who died in 670 AD. He was arguably the greatest scholar of Tuaim Drecain, one of the great secular universities in 'Dark Age' Ireland. Ireland was at this time internationally renowned for the high quality of the teaching in its universities, and noblemens' sons were sent there for their education from all over northern Europe.
Cenn Faelad wrote treatises on Irish grammar, legal traditions and some historical texts. He was known to have supported Colmcille's call for independence of the Dal Raidans in what became Scotland.
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