Studio: international art (9.1897)

Beautiful Modern Manuscripts

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1

a more remarkable and seemingly non-derivative
style had attained to such perfection in the British
Isles " that it might be said to be the work of
angelic rather than human diligence "—/// vere hacc
omnia angelica potins qitam humana diligentia jam
asseveraveris esse composita, as Giraldus Cambrensis
has it. The Book of Kelts contains the earliest and
most marvellous record of this work. Mr. Wyatt
tells us that his friend, Mr. Westwood, counted,
with a magnifying glass, on a quarter of an inch of
surface, u no less than one hundred and fifty-eight
interlacements of a slender ribbon pattern formed
of white lines, edged by black ones, upon a black
ground." To me, personally, the Book of Kelts
hardly suggests angelic workmanship. The inter-
woven ribbons, the spirals, and the diagonal lines,
of which its fantastic patterns are formed, have
something uncanny about them, while the lacertine
beasts and birds, with their baleful heads and claws,
hint rather at a Satanic touch ! To Ireland be-
longs the honour of this masterpiece, achieved
while it was the most prosperous island of the West.
The direct offspring of the Book of Kells was the
Anglo-Hibernian Durham Book, produced at the
monastery of Lindisfarne, which had been founded
by .St. Aidan, the friend of St. Columba, in the
year 634.

A fusion of the Roman, Byzantine, and Celtic

ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT BY MRS. TRAQUAIR

4«

ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT BY MRS. TRAQUAIR

styles was brought about by the Episcopi Vagantes,
as the early missionaries were called, who, illumi-
nated Bible in hand, propagated art as well as
doctrine. The MSS. enriched with Celtic orna-
ment influenced Continental schools, while from
Rome came Pope Gregory's gift of books with St.
Augustine, to be copied and assimilated by Anglo-
Saxon scribes. When MSS. in Byzantine gold
and purple reached England at the close of the
seventh century, the elements for fusion were com-
plete. These found their final smelting-pot in the
Scriptorium of Hyde Abbey, near Winchester,
in the tenth century. The debt which France had
incurred to England through the learned and en-
lightened labours of Alcuin of York at the court of
Charlemagne in the ninth century, she paid back
in the twelfth, when, on the marriage of Eleanor of
Guienne with our Henry II., French influence
stimulated the arts which had pined almost to
death after the Conquest. Thenceforward English
illumination developed on Continental lines, its
only distinction being, according to one authority,
"a noble tone of solid colour." Solidity hardly
seems a happy distinction in our Art, however
admirable in our national roast beef, but our MSS.
belie the praise. Many of them are most ethereal
and elegant.

Space forbids a minute chronicle of the adult
phases of illumination. They are generally classi-

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