2 - The Fountain Sealed Up in the Garden Enclosed: A Vine Scroll at Kells

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.