The Book of Kells derives its name from the Columban Monastery of Kells or Kenlis, originally Cennanas, a place of ancient importance in the county of Meath, Ireland, and it is supposed to have been the Great Gospel brought to the Christian settlement by its founder, St. Columba, and perhaps written by that saint, who died in the year 597. The original volume is in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
In one of the pages of this book is represented the Greek monogram of Christ, and the whole page is devoted to three words, Christi Autem Generatio. It is a remarkable instance of an ornamental initial spreading over an entire page. The effect of the whole as a decoration is perhaps what might be called heavy, but it is full of marvellous detail and richness, and highly characteristic of Celtic forms of ornamental design (_see_ No. 1, Appendix).
The work of the scribe, as shown in the form of the ordinary letters of the text, is very fine. They are very firm and strong in character, to balance the closely knit and firmly built ornamentation of the initial letters and other ornaments of the pages. We feel that they have a dignity, a distinction, and a character all their own.
There is a page in the same book where the symbols of the evangelists are inclosed in circles, and panelled in a solid framing occupying the whole page, which suggests Byzantine feeling in design.
The full pages in the earlier illuminated MSS. were often panelled out in four or more compartments to hold figures of saints, or emblems, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries such panels generally had small patterned diapered backgrounds, on dark blue, red, green, or burnished gold.
The Anglo-Saxon MSS. show traces of the influence of the traditions of Classic art drawn through the Byzantine, or from the Roman sources, which naturally affected the earliest forms of Christian art as we see its relics in the catacombs. These classical traditions are especially noticeable in the treatment of the draperies clinging in linear and elliptical folds to express the limbs. In fact, it might be said that, spread westward and northward by the Christian colonies, this classical tradition in figure design lingered on, until its renewal at the dawn of the Renaissance itself, and the resurrection of classical art in Italy, which, uniting with a new naturalism, grew to that wonderful development which has affected the art of Europe ever since.