The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Insular · an illuminated Gospel book in Latin · 340 surviving leaves of calfskin vellum, 680 pages, about 33 by 25 centimetres as trimmed · Insular majuscule, by more than one scribe and several painters · made in the Columban monastic world of Iona and Kells about 800, and never finished · Trinity College Dublin, MS 58, in four volumes, shown in the Old Library
Mode
Illuminated Gospel book as relic and liturgy; script, ornament and figure composed as one surface through a whole codex
Mythos
The Word made flesh in the letter; the four living creatures as one fourfold vision; the common creature inside the holy name
Phase
Made about 800 in the Columban houses of Iona and Kells, in the years of the Viking raids, and never finished; seen an opening at a time
Presentation
Vellum, 340 surviving leaves of about 33 by 25 centimetres; canon tables, full-page miniatures, a cross page, great initial pages and decorated text pages over a running text in Insular majuscule
Register
From the hieratic icon and the cosmic cross to cats, mice and men pulling beards; the sublime of the very small, with almost no terror
Scale
The four Gospels, one monastic family, one opening at a time
Governing Proposition
A Gospel book made in the Columban houses of Iona and Kells about 800 decorates not only its great pages but its running text, so that almost no page is left plain. At Matthew’s account of the birth of Christ the name swells until three letters fill the page and the rest of the sentence shrinks to a tail, and at the foot of that page two cats watch mice who hold a wafer. The wager of the book is that the Word is to be seen as well as read, most of all where it becomes flesh, and that every letter of the holy text, and every creature drawn among the letters, belongs inside one honour.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Book of Kells is a Gospel book in Latin: the four Gospels, with the canon tables, summaries and prefaces that went before them. It was made in the Columban monastic world of Iona and Kells about 800, within a range commonly given from the later eighth century to the earlier ninth, by more than one scribe and several painters. It survives as 340 leaves of calfskin vellum, 680 pages, each about 33 by 25 centimetres as trimmed. The text is the Vulgate, mixed with Old Latin readings, written in Insular majuscule. The words belong to the evangelists and to Jerome’s revision. What the makers chose was what to magnify, where to place it, how to write it and how to adorn it, and the book is that choice carried through every page.
It opens with canon tables, the concordance that shows where the Gospels tell the same thing, set under painted arcades with the symbols of the evangelists above them. At 7v the Virgin sits with the Child on her knee among angels, facing the opening of the summaries. Then each Gospel begins on a page given almost wholly to its first words: “Liber generationis” (“The book of the generation”, Matthew 1:1), “Initium evangelii” (“The beginning of the gospel”, Mark 1:1), “Quoniam quidem multi” (“Since indeed many”, Luke 1:1), and “In principio erat verbum” (“In the beginning was the Word”, John 1:1), the last set out as a monument. Symbol pages stand before the Gospels, and before Matthew and John a portrait of the evangelist as well. No portrait of Mark or of Luke survives, and whether they were lost or never made is not known.
The book is made to be seen an opening at a time, a decorated page facing a page of text, and it is built for that unit: the symbol page faces the portrait, the portrait faces the initial, and the turn of a leaf is the step from one to the next. Within the text the script runs in an order of size: the running majuscule, the coloured initials, the display letters, and the great pages where a few words fill the leaf. The size of a word is what the word is. Three places are magnified above the rest, the openings of the Gospels, the name of Christ at his entry into history, and the Passion, and at each a hinge of the text becomes a page.
Movement II
Matthew opens with a genealogy, and then turns to the birth. Before that turn the book sets a page of a cross with eight circles, the order of the cosmos given as geometry, and the Chi-Rho follows it. At 34r the name of Christ, abbreviated, swells until its three letters fill the page. The Chi sweeps across the whole leaf, and the rest of the sentence shrinks to a tail: “Christi autem generatio”
“Now the begetting of Christ” (Matthew 1:18). It is the verse at which, in the text, Christ enters history, and the book makes it the place where the name becomes a body.
The field of the page is spirals, trumpet patterns and knotwork, laid so densely that from a little way off it reads as light, and close to resolves into thread after thread, none of them lost. The letters are not decorated by the ornament; they are made of it. The doctrine that the Word was made flesh is not shown in a picture beside the text. It is enacted in the letter: the name grows until it is the page, and the words around it become small. What a listener hears at this verse, the book makes a viewer see.
At the foot of the same page two cats watch mice, and the mice hold a round wafer, commonly read as the bread of the Eucharist. The common world is inside the holy name. What the scene means beyond that has never been settled, but its place is not in doubt: the smallest creatures in the book share the page that holds its greatest letters, in one fabric with them and under one attention. The page says, with the means a page has, that attention is a form of reverence, and that the smallest thing stands in the same order as the greatest. It says it with a few creatures at the edge of a field of ornament, and the rest of what the page holds is the Gospel’s.
Movement III
The figures came from far away. The Virgin and Child at 7v is a hieratic icon: the Virgin enthroned, the Child on her knee, angels about them, all framed in interlace, and her chair ends in a beast’s head. The enthroned Virgin and the canon arcades reached the Columban houses from late antique models. The four living creatures of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, man, lion, calf and eagle, stand over the canon tables, on the symbol pages and through the decoration, so that four Gospels are read as one fourfold vision. In the portraits the evangelists’ robes become fields of ornament. The figure is drawn into pattern by the law of the native line.
Two pages tell a story in a picture, which Insular books rarely do. In the Temptation Christ stands on the Temple, the Temple drawn as a house-shaped reliquary, and the devil is a black, wasted figure. In the Arrest, in Matthew’s Passion, Christ is seized. Both come from Mediterranean prototypes and sit a little apart from the ornament around them. The figure drawing is schematic beside the spirals of the Chi-Rho, and the Arrest is the weaker page. Why these two scenes stand where they do, at the Gospel’s points of trial, is still asked.
The crucifixion itself is not painted. The Passion is marked by decorated text pages, one at the hymn sung before they went out to the Mount of Olives and one at the crucifixion, where the words are made the image: “Tunc crucifixerant”
“Then they had crucified” (Matthew 27:38). Here the book follows an Old Latin reading rather than the Vulgate. The life of Christ is held as text, not as picture, except at a few points, and at the event the book exists to honour, it gives the honour to the letter, as it did at the birth.
Movement IV
On an ordinary page of the running text the decoration does not stop. An initial rises out of the column into a coiled beast; small heads end the lines; beasts bite their own tails inside the minor initials; men pull each other’s beards. Almost no page is left plain. The case for this is the book’s own: every letter of the holy text deserves honour, so the profusion is the claim, not ornament laid over it. Yet the creatures are many and most could change places, and away from the great pages the decoration follows the space the scribe left more than the sense of the words.
The ornament was laid out on grid and compass and drawn freehand at a scale that rewards a lens: spirals, trumpet patterns, knotwork and the interlace of beasts, with no thread lost. The colour is a broad palette, laid in layers for depth. The script is Insular majuscule at its most formal, and the initials grow out of the line, so that text and ornament are composed as one surface. The hands are several and unequal. Some of the decoration was never finished, and the text carries errors that were never corrected, in a book whose whole purpose was the honour of its words.
Behind the book stand the carpet pages and symbols of the Book of Durrow, Lindisfarne’s union of Insular ornament and Mediterranean figure, the Lichfield and Echternach Gospels and Pictish animal art. Kells carries all of it further: decoration leaves the great pages and enters the whole text, the Chi-Rho becomes a page entire, narrative pictures appear, and figure and ornament are fused rather than set side by side. It is the culmination of its tradition more than a break with it. It was made in the years of the Viking raids, at the cost of the community’s wealth, and it was never finished; whether it was made at Iona, at Kells or at both is still open. After it the Insular tradition was cut short, and Carolingian art passed it over.
Movement V
At Kells the book was kept as a relic of Columba. In 1007 it was stolen from the stone church there, and the Annals of Ulster, entering the theft, name it the chief treasure of the western world. The book came back; its cover, the metalwork that enclosed it, did not, and nothing is known of how that looked. Later hands wrote records and notes on its blank leaves, and later owners numbered them. None of this is the illuminated work, and all of it is part of how the work survived.
About thirty leaves are lost by the usual estimate, among them the beginning of the prefatory matter and the end of John, whose text breaks off before the Gospel’s close. A binder’s trimming has cut into the decoration of the margins in places. What carried the book’s meaning survives: the four Gospel openings, the cross page and the Chi-Rho, the Virgin and Child, both narrative pictures, the Passion pages and the canon tables. The book has been in Dublin since the 1650s. It is kept in the Old Library of Trinity College in four volumes, two of them shown at a time, open under glass in low light, the openings changed from time to time: about four of 680 pages in view at once, six in a thousand. A codex was always seen an opening at a time, and the rest is present in facsimile and in Trinity’s digitisation, 1,226 years after the making.
Its reach came late. No later manuscript can be shown to descend from it. The Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century took its ornament for a national style, in metalwork, in print and on memorials; Joyce took up the Tunc page in Finnegans Wake; The Secret of Kells (2009) made the book a story. Gerald of Wales, describing a Gospel book he saw at Kildare, wrote of its ornament as the work of angels rather than of men; it was another book, and the response is the one this book still draws. Its students still ask where it was made, when within half a century, whether for reading, for the altar or for display, and what the cats and the mice mean. The cats are still at the foot of the page, watching the mice who hold the wafer, under the name.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the book’s structure and the relation of its decoration to its text. The great pages stand where the text requires them: at the openings of the four Gospels, at the Chi-Rho where Christ enters history, and at the Passion, where decorated text pages mark the hymn and the crucifixion. Remove any one and the book loses a hinge of its argument; the canon tables are required by its work as a harmonised Gospel. What resists the test is the profusion. The animals in the line ends and the men pulling each other’s beards are ordered and alive, but most could be thinned without loss. That every letter of the holy text deserves honour is their case, and it carries the axis this far; the uncorrected errors in the text hold it here.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Two things are brought into the open, and both hold. The Word is a body: at the Chi-Rho the name of Christ swells until three letters fill the page, so the Incarnation is enacted in the letter, not illustrated beside it. And the sacred and the common are one fabric: at the foot of that page two cats watch mice who hold what is commonly read as a eucharistic wafer. Both hold without the theology: attention is a form of reverence, and the smallest thing stands in the order of the greatest. What holds the axis lowest is that the first disclosure is the Gospel’s doctrine, made visible rather than uncovered, and the second, the book’s own, is carried by a few marginal creatures. It articulates a devotion more than a human condition.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height and frequency are both high. The Chi-Rho is a field of spirals, trumpet patterns and knotwork so dense that it reads as light, with the Chi sweeping across the page. The cross page gives the order of the cosmos in geometry. The Virgin and Child is a hieratic icon framed in interlace, the Virgin’s chair ending in a beast’s head. The first words of John stand as a monument. And the elevation recurs: an ordinary page carries an initial rising out of the column into a coiled beast. It is the sublime of the very small, transport by detail that does not run out. Held below the highest marks by scale: the book is seen an opening at a time, at the size of a page, and terror is almost absent.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The four living creatures of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, man, lion, calf and eagle, are the book’s skeleton: they stand over the canon tables, on the symbol pages before the Gospels and through the decoration, so that four Gospels become one fourfold vision. The Chi-Rho makes the name the place of incarnation. The snake that sheds its skin, the peacock whose flesh was held incorruptible and the vine carry the resurrection and the Eucharist into the ornament. The Temptation on the Temple and the Arrest stand at the Gospel’s points of trial. Everything stays particular: this cat, this beard, this chair. Held below the top because the myth is the Gospel’s, inherited whole, and what is built is the arrangement and the incorporation.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is plain: the carpet pages and symbols of the Book of Durrow, Lindisfarne’s union of Insular ornament and Mediterranean figure, the Lichfield and Echternach Gospels, Pictish animal art, and the late antique models, the canon arcades and the enthroned Virgin, that reached the Columban houses. The departure: decoration leaves the major pages and runs through the whole text; the Chi-Rho becomes a page entire; narrative pictures appear at the Passion and the Temptation, rare in Insular books; figure and ornament are fused, not set side by side. The stake was the community’s wealth and, in the years of the Viking raids, its survival, and the book was never finished. But the turn is one of degree and synthesis, a culmination more than a break, and it stands a tenth above the gate.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The book knows what it knows through the codex and the letter. The order of the script, from the running majuscule to the great display letters, is an order of sacred weight: the size of a word is what the word is. The opening, a decorated page facing a text page, is the unit of experience: the symbol page faces the portrait, the portrait faces the initial, and the Chi-Rho follows the cross. Substitute a plain codex and the Word made flesh in the letter goes; substitute a wall cycle and the intimacy goes, with the turning of the leaf. Held below the top because the unfinished decoration and the absent portraits leave the scheme uneven, and away from the great pages the minor decoration follows the scribe’s space rather than the text’s sense.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence over promise, across more than a millennium: a relic of Columba in the annals, a treasure in Dublin since the 1650s, and modern study in lines that do not agree, from Sullivan’s introduction and Françoise Henry’s study to work on the Chi-Rho, on liturgy and audience, and on word and image. The questions stay open: whether it was made at Iona, at Kells or at both; its date within half a century; whether it was for reading, for the altar or for display; why the Arrest and the Temptation stand where they do; what the cats and the mice mean. The detail itself keeps yielding, and viewers still find creatures in it. Held a step lower because many of the disputes concern place, date and hands, not meaning.
Score: 9.1 / 10
In view since its making, so force and reach are scored together, in Insular book painting in Ireland and Britain. The force is high: the summa of the Insular style, a whole codex made one field of ornament, figure and script, with almost no page left plain. The reach is late. The Insular tradition was cut short by the Viking age and passed over by Carolingian art, and no later manuscript can be shown to descend from this one. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the discount is heavy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century, which took its ornament for a national style in metalwork, print and memorials; Joyce’s use of the Tunc page in Finnegans Wake; and The Secret of Kells (2009).
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival of what makes the work, weighed form first. The defining form is legible: all four Gospel openings survive, with the Chi-Rho, the cross page, the Virgin and Child, both narrative pictures, the Passion pages and the canon tables. About thirty leaves are lost by the usual estimate, among them the end of John and the beginning of the prefatory matter, and no portrait of Mark or Luke survives; a binder’s trimming has cut into marginal decoration. What carried the meaning survives. Presence has been continuous: Columba’s relic at Kells, in Dublin since the 1650s and long on view. Four pages shown at a time is the codex’s own condition, and the whole is present in facsimile and digitisation. The lost cover, the theft and the cropping hold it here.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of Insular illumination and script on vellum, and the making is load-bearing everywhere. The ornament: spirals, trumpet patterns, knotwork and the interlace of beasts, laid out on grid and compass and drawn freehand at a scale that rewards a lens, with no thread lost. The colour: a broad palette laid in layers for depth. The script: Insular majuscule at its most formal, with initials that grow out of the line. And text and ornament composed as one surface. The costs are real: the figure drawing is schematic beside the ornament, and the Arrest weaker than the Chi-Rho; the hands differ in quality; some decoration is unfinished; and the text carries errors a scriptorium charged with the Word should not have left.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the canon tables, architecture borrowed from late antique books, and the cat and mice at the foot of the Chi-Rho page. They obey one law. Everything is drawn into the line: architecture becomes interlace, the figure becomes pattern, the animal becomes letter and the letter animal. The Virgin’s chair ends in a beast’s head, the evangelists’ robes are fields of ornament, the initials of the running text are animals bent to the shape of the letter. The range runs from the cosmic cross to the domestic cat, and it holds. What resists is the plurality of hands and models: the portraits and the narrative pictures, from Mediterranean prototypes, sit a little apart from the native ornament, and the unfinished passages show the law incompletely applied.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the four Gospels entire, harmonised by the canon tables, from the genealogies to the Passion. The cosmos: the circles of the cross page and the fourfold creatures. The natural order: cats, mice, fish, birds, hounds, snakes, lions and the vine, alive in the text. The human: men in the initials pulling one another’s beards, and the faces at the line ends. History: the generations of Matthew and of Luke, Luke’s set out as a column of names. What is thin is the social world, labour, the state and individual consciousness, and the life of Christ is held as text, not as image, except at a few points. The painted chapels, whose figures carry the human world, hold more.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 9.2, and The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 9.1. Ornament drawn at a fineness no Insular book matches, with script and decoration one surface; a codex whose order of script is an order of sacred weight, built for the opening; elevation by inexhaustible detail, page after page; more than a millennium of return with the questions still open; and one law of the line from the canon arcades to the cat at the foot of the Chi-Rho.
Limiting Dimension
The Unconcealment at 8.4: the first thing the book discloses, the Word as a body, is the Gospel’s doctrine made visible rather than uncovered, and its own, the common creature inside the holy name, is carried by a few marginal creatures. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.5, held by a profusion of creatures that could be thinned without loss and by errors left in the text. The two are one fact: the book magnifies a meaning it inherits, and magnifies it by profusion.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve at 8.6 clears it by one tenth, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. The twelve sum to 106.3 and average 8.9, below the 9.0 the summit also requires; the placement in Tier IV is settled on the aggregate and on the gate alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the manuscript as it survives in the Old Library of Trinity College Dublin, MS 58: the decorated pages and the illuminated text scored together as one work, from the canon tables to the broken end of John. No image, facsimile or written source was consulted, and no text of the manuscript or of the Vulgate was in hand. The Latin Gospel text is the occasion, not the object: the words belong to the evangelists and to Jerome’s revision, and what is scored is the book that makes them visible, its choice of what to magnify, its script, its placing, its decoration and the arrangement of the codex. Not in the unit: the Gospel text as literature; the lost cover, weighed only as a loss to the object; the records, notes and foliation added on its leaves by later hands, weighed only as facts of survival; the other Insular books and the high crosses of Kells, which are the tradition; and the facsimiles and digital images, which are evidence of presence. Latin is quoted only where the words are certain: the Vulgate opening words of the four Gospels and of Matthew 1:18, given as words and not as the letter forms on the page, and Tunc crucifixerant, the opening of the page at Matthew 27:38, where the book follows an Old Latin reading. The English glosses are the desk’s own, plain and literal, and no published translation is quoted. The Annals of Ulster and Gerald of Wales are paraphrased. Folios are given only for the Virgin and Child (7v) and the Chi-Rho (34r). Figures and facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of calves, the number of leaves counted in earlier centuries, the folios of the other pages, the division of the hands, the pigments, the details of the theft, the dates of the rebindings, of the move to Dublin and of the gift to Trinity College, the dates of the later writing on the blank leaves, and whether the portraits of Mark and Luke were lost or never made.