Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Recutting the Cross: The Anglo-Saxon Baptismal Font at Wilne
- 2 The Fountain Sealed Up in the Garden Enclosed: A Vine Scroll at Kells
- 3 The Art of the Church in Ninth-Century Anglo- Saxon England: The Case of the Newent Cross
- 4 ‘The Stones of the Wall Will Cry Out’: Lithic Emissaries and Marble Messengers in Andreas
- 5 Conversion, Ritual, and Landscape: Streoneshalh (Whitby), Osingadun, and the Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Street House, North Yorkshire
- 6 Outside the Box: Relics and Reliquaries at the Shrine of St Cuthbert in the Later Middle Ages
- 7 An Unusual Hell Mouth in an Old Testament Illustration: Understanding the Numbers Initial in the Twelfth-Century Laud Bible
- 8 The Problem of Man: Carved from the Same Stone
- 9 Glass Beads: Production and Decorative Motifs
- 10 Unmasking Meaning: Faces Hidden and Revealed in Early Anglo-Saxon England
- 11 Alcuin, Mathematics and the Rational Mind
- 12 Looking Down from the Rothbury Cross: (Re)Viewing the Place of Anglo-Saxon Art
- Bibliography of Jane Hawkes’ Writings
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- ALREADY PUBLISHED
2 - The Fountain Sealed Up in the Garden Enclosed: A Vine Scroll at Kells
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Recutting the Cross: The Anglo-Saxon Baptismal Font at Wilne
- 2 The Fountain Sealed Up in the Garden Enclosed: A Vine Scroll at Kells
- 3 The Art of the Church in Ninth-Century Anglo- Saxon England: The Case of the Newent Cross
- 4 ‘The Stones of the Wall Will Cry Out’: Lithic Emissaries and Marble Messengers in Andreas
- 5 Conversion, Ritual, and Landscape: Streoneshalh (Whitby), Osingadun, and the Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Street House, North Yorkshire
- 6 Outside the Box: Relics and Reliquaries at the Shrine of St Cuthbert in the Later Middle Ages
- 7 An Unusual Hell Mouth in an Old Testament Illustration: Understanding the Numbers Initial in the Twelfth-Century Laud Bible
- 8 The Problem of Man: Carved from the Same Stone
- 9 Glass Beads: Production and Decorative Motifs
- 10 Unmasking Meaning: Faces Hidden and Revealed in Early Anglo-Saxon England
- 11 Alcuin, Mathematics and the Rational Mind
- 12 Looking Down from the Rothbury Cross: (Re)Viewing the Place of Anglo-Saxon Art
- Bibliography of Jane Hawkes’ Writings
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- ALREADY PUBLISHED
Summary
The South Cross at Kells (Fig. 2.1) – also known as the Cross of Patrick and Columba, after the inscription on the base of the monument, and as the Tower Cross for its proximity to the round tower – is one of four free-standing, sculpted stone crosses (along with the base of a now lost fifth cross) surviving from the early Middle Ages at Kells. An entry in the Annals of Ulster records that the Kells community was founded in the early ninth century from Iona, the influential monastery established off the west coast of Scotland by the Irish monk Colum Cille (d. 597). It is generally agreed that the Kells crosses were made from the late ninth to the tenth century, with Peter Harbison specifying the period 835–950. Helen Roe considered the South Cross to be the earliest of the sculpted monuments at Kells because it is more highly ornamented than the others, especially in the case of the Market Cross, where the visual programme is rendered almost entirely with figural scenes. Informing Roe's analysis was the established scholarly view that because manuscript painting was understood to have developed earlier than stone carving in early medieval Irish art (where stonework used vegetal designs that were more often employed in manuscript decoration), the stone monument must have been made early, before sculptors developed their craft independent of their manuscript models. Roe described the South Cross as a ‘manuscript’ cross because, ‘in its profusion, quality and variety, and by a sort of controlled wildness of concept, the decoration of this cross most nearly approaches the characteristic expression of manuscript art’. An understudied panel with an inhabited vine-scroll on the narrow, north face of the South Cross (Fig. 2.2), fits Roe's description especially well. The vine scrollwould arguably have been understood by its makers and viewers as a representation of a Tree of Life. In formal terms, Trees of Life are vines that bear fruit and support a variety of animals.
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- Information
- Insular IconographiesEssays in Honour of Jane Hawkes, pp. 23 - 48Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019