Early Medieval and Romanesque Art

The art of the early medieval period in the British Isles, generally called Insular or Hiberno-Saxon art, developed in the monastic scriptoria of Ireland and Northumbria after the fall of Rome, blending Celtic La Tène spiral ornament, Anglo-Saxon animal interlace, and Mediterranean manuscript traditions brought by missionaries. Monasteries such as Iona, founded by Saint Columba off the Scottish coast, and Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast, became centers of book production where monks copied the Gospels in Latin using elaborate decorated initials and carpet pages of pure ornament. The Lindisfarne Gospels, produced around 700 CE and traditionally attributed to the scribe-bishop Eadfrith, combine interlace patterns with delicate zoomorphic motifs and represent one of the finest achievements of the style. The Book of Kells, generally dated to around 800 CE, is the most celebrated Insular manuscript, containing the four Gospels in Latin lavished with an unprecedented density of interlace, spirals, and fantastical creatures woven into the text itself, most famously on its Chi-Rho page, which enlarges the monogram of Christ's name into a nearly abstract field of ornament. Scholars generally agree the manuscript was begun at the monastery of Iona and completed, after a Viking raid forced the community to relocate, at Kells in Ireland, though the exact division of work between the two sites remains debated.