Kells to Clonmacnoise: Medieval Irish Art in Context
The Bellarmine Museum
April 18 - May 24, 2011
This exhibition highlights the University's facsimile of the Book of Kells, and four reproductions of Irish medieval metalwork on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. The Book of Kells is a lavishly decorated Irish gospel book, which contains colorful decorations on each calligraphic page, including several full page illustrations.
Produced ca. 800 A.D. at the height of Irish monastic influence in Europe, it is a unique record of one of the most vital periods of Christian history from which few liturgical objects survive. This period, the so-called "Golden Age" of Irish art, was an era of rich cultural exchange when Irish and Continental monks helped to spread Christianity throughout the British Isles. Arts, in all media, combined pre-Christian Celtic and Germanic traditions with new Christian forms. Irish monasteries throughout the British Isles were centers of production for sumptuous manuscripts and finely crafted liturgical objects, as this show will make clear.