![]() ![]() ![]() As in Eastern antecedents, their wings form a canopy over the Virgin their symmetrical placement framing mother and child imparts a monumental, iconic quality. ![]() The four angels attending the scene introduce a hieratic aspect to the image, overlaying its affectionate informality with dogmatic structure. Christ is thus at once identified with pre-Christian warrior heroes and tonsured clergy, raising the cachet of the latter to the cultural heroism of the former. It is significant that the blonde hair and red-coloured beards in these figures match earlier Roman descriptions of Gaulish heroes bleaching their hair and long moustaches with urine and lime, as well as descriptions of native Irish heroes such as Cu Chulainn in the Tain Bo Cuailnge and Fionn mac Cumhaill in the Fenian cycle but equally it is now believed this hairstyle is associated with the tonsure worn by clerics in the Irish church. Instead, Christ’s blonde hair is arranged in the distinctive curling tendrils particular to evangelical portraits and those of Christ in several Insular gospel manuscripts, including Kells folios 32v and f114r. ![]() Yet in this image, Christ’s head does not bear a nimbus like his mother’s enamel-like halo, nor is his hair depicted in the same manner as the attending angels or ordinary men. Christ looks into her face as he reaches out to his mother, and their hands touch as he leans back into her cradling arm: gestures and postures that create a sense of intimate and tender maternalism, an expression of humanised religious feeling rare in early Christian art.Ĭuriously, the Christ child is not only clad in saffron-dyed Irish clothing, but depicted as a small adult, complete with the curling golden hair and long moustache of a pre-Christian Celtic hero. In Irish literature, Christ was identified almost exclusively by his matronymic mac Mhuire, the son of Mary. In the Kells miniature, the artist places the infant Christ seated at an angle across his mother’s lap, creating a pattern of crossed diagonals that draws attention to the figures’ interrelation. Despite her sexless Coptic antecedents, this Irish Virgin is a fertile mother. Prior to the ninth century, Celtic Christianity habitually articulated the Virgin almost an avatar of older fertility goddesses, with early religious literature dwelling on Mary’s sexuality and describing her breasts and womb in a frankly sexual context. But instead of being a ‘primitive’ detail, it further establishes the syncretism of the image. The finely draped texture of her clothing clearly reveals the Virgin’s breasts, seemingly out of place in religious art. She is seated sideways on her high-backed chair with the infant Christ in her lap: a pose which despite its Hiberno-Saxon stylisation is recognisably Coptic in origin, being an unconventional variant of the seated Hodegetria type found throughout Eastern Christian art. This is not mere culture-specific ornament: the Imperial purple mantle and the veil and brooch indicates her universality by referencing the immediately recognisable garments of both a Byzantine empress and an Irish queen.īut perhaps the most universal aspect of the Kells Virgin is her depiction as a mother. Painted by one of three artists who illuminated the Gospels codex around 800 AD, the full-page miniature depicts the Virgin enthroned with the infant Christ and attended by angels. The Virgin dominates the composition, her importance denoted by her large size and central placement. She is shown in the native Irish saffron veil and mantle rather than the more usual Byzantine maphorion, and the cross commonly found on the shoulder in Eastern depictions of the Virgin is stylised here as an Insular cruciform brooch. But while where see a simple picture of the Virgin and Child, its creators would understand the image as cosmopolitan, syncretic and deeply symbolic.
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