![]() ![]() The 11th Century Annals of Ulster describe the Book of Kells as “ primh-mind iarthair domain”, “the most precious object of the Western world”. There monks created the lovely Lindisfarne Gospel but the Irish would claim the Book of Kells is the finest of its kind. Monks from the original monastery founded by St Columba also set up other monastic communities including one on the great rock of Lindisfarne in Northumberland, established by the Ionan monk Aidan in 635. The Book of Kells isn’t the only illuminated manuscript in the so-called insular style. This is a description thought by many to be of the Book of Kells by the 12th Century writer Gerald of Wales: Practically all of the 680 pages are decorated in some way or another. On some pages every corner is filled with the most detailed and beautiful Celtic designs. Written on vellum, it is estimated that the skins of 185 calves were needed for the project. The scale and ambition of The Book of Kells is incredible. A few years later it reached Trinity College where it remains today. According to the Annals of Ulster it was found “two months and twenty days” later “under a sod.” After fighting in the Cromwellian period, the church at Kells lay in ruins, and in 1653 the book was sent to Dublin by the governor of Kells for safekeeping. ![]() But medieval sources do record that an illuminated manuscript was stolen from the stone church of Kells in 1006 which is likely to have been the Book of Kells. The most likely theory is that the monks took the manuscript with them.Īmazingly since they were written, the majority of the pages have been passed down through the generations with just 60 pages missing. In 806, following a raid that left 68 of the community dead, the Columban monks took refuge in a newly-founded monastery at Kells in County Meath in Ireland to keep them safe. The monastery, like many early Christian communities, came under the threat of Viking raids. Notable are the ninth-century bejeweled Lindau Gospels, the tenth-century Beatus, the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, and the celebrated Hours of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the best-known Italian Renaissance manuscript.But it wasn't just forces of nature with which the monks had to contend. The majority of these books are of a religious nature, but the collection also includes important classical works, scientific manuscripts dealing with astronomy and medicine, and practical works on agriculture, hunting, and warfare. More than fifty Coptic manuscripts from Hamouli, Egypt, nearly all of which were found in their original bindings, form the oldest and most important group of Sahidic manuscripts from a single provenance, the Monastery of St. There are also examples of Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Arabic, Persian, and Indian manuscripts. The Morgan's collection is made up primarily of Western manuscripts, with French being the largest single national group, followed by Italian, English, German, Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish. Although the collection was formed to illustrate the history of manuscript illumination and includes significant masterpieces from the ninth to sixteenth centuries, there are also some important textual manuscripts. To this should be added the Glazier, Heineman, Bühler, Stillman, and Wightman manuscripts, which include more than two hundred more items. Spanning some ten centuries of Western illumination, it includes more than eleven hundred manuscripts as well as papyri. Since Morgan's death in 1913, the collection has more than doubled. ![]() When Pierpont Morgan acquired his first medieval manuscripts at the end of the nineteenth century, he laid the foundation for a collection whose quality would rank among the greatest in the world. ![]()
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