The Book of Kells is a richly illustrated handwritten book written by Irish monks in 800. It is one of the most lavishly decorated with exquisite miniatures and ornaments of medieval manuscripts among all that have come down to us.
The book contains four Gospels in Latin, an introduction and an interpretation, decorated with a huge number of colored patterns and miniatures. The book is currently housed in the Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland.
According to the main version of its origin, the book was created in the scriptorium of the monastery of St. Columbus on the island of Iona at the end of the 8th - beginning of the 9th century. After the monastery was destroyed by the Normans, the book was transported by fleeing monks to Ireland, to the Abbey of Kells, from where the book got its name.
The text is accompanied by incredibly complex full-page drawings, and small artistic embellishments are often found in the text itself. The book uses a wide palette of colors, the most common are purple, lilac, red, pink, green, and yellow.
All decorations in the book are made with the highest skill. The complexity of their design is often breathtaking. In one pattern, which occupies a square inch of the page, there are 158 intricate intersections of a white ribbon with a dark border. Some patterns can only be discerned with a magnifying glass, although they did not yet exist at the time of this book. The patterns and ornaments that can be seen in this book have many parallels with the jewelry and stone carvings left over from that period. The designs of these patterns are often used in jewelry and tattoos today.
Special gaze technique and … stereo effect
Promotional video:
The medieval illuminated Gospels, written by the Celts, are distinguished by such a filigree technique of execution that at a slightly later time they said about these manuscripts: "This is not the work of man, but of angels." Professor John Cisne of Cornell University found the answer to the mystery of the ancient monks' skill.
He studied several of these most prominent manuscripts, produced between 670 and 800 AD. These masterpieces are distinguished by the presence of a certain number of "carpet" pages - completely occupied by patterns, as well as a large number of illustrations in the text.
In particular, Sisne analyzed the famous Book of Kells, created by Irish monks around 800, one of the most richly illustrated manuscripts for the entire period from the end of the 6th to the beginning of the 9th centuries, a real pinnacle of skill in drawing miniatures and ornaments. The professor also used in his research the Book of Durrow, an equally striking manuscript that appeared in the 7th century.
Many elements of the images on their pages are made with a resolution of up to 30 lines per centimeter, and in one square inch of another illustration one can sometimes count over one and a half hundred complex intersections of "ribbons" of different colors. The high accuracy of the ornaments and the thickness of the details of less than one millimeter is one of the features that made modern scholars admire folios and puzzle over the technique of their manufacture.
The professor (whose main field of activity is paleontology) drew attention to the fact that in many illustrations there are regularly repeating patterns and, in general, small elements, as if copied from a template. In addition, it turned out that the most complex ornaments present on the page in several places at once are separated by a distance corresponding to the average distance between the pupils of a person. This led the researcher to the idea that the vision of the authors of the books played a key role in the filigree execution of the drawings, more precisely - a special technique of gaze and … a stereo effect.
Sisne put forward such an explanation for the secret of the drawings. The monks probably created a number of filigree patterns for certain "standard" elements of the design. They placed them next to the new sheet and spread their gaze so that each eye saw only a template or a reproducible piece of a pattern. Thanks to the stereo effect, the illusion of a three-dimensional image was created, in which any error in drawing the line (shift to the side) led to a difference in apparent height in this part of the drawing.
Moreover, the ability of our brain to interpret the shift in two pictures as depth made it possible to increase any roughness in the drawing up to 30 times, the British scientist calculated. By minimizing the apparent ups and downs in the volumetric lines, the ancient craftsmen could well keep within the submillimeter range of the template reproduction accuracy. And all it took was a steady hand and some training in unusual use of the eyes.
The scientist called this method "free-fusion stereocomparison". It was he, the professor believes, who allowed the Celtic monks to create such filigree repeating ornaments long before the invention of lenses and microscopes. “Most people do not understand how accurate our eyes are, and do not think that they can be used in a slightly different way than the obvious way,” added Sisne.
And the fact that the secret of drawing such graceful and precise ornaments was carefully buried, John explains logically: this is part of the propaganda war of the Celtic Church against the Roman. The established reputation for books such as those written by angels may well have helped attract followers.
