Early Christian Irish Art

Lying at Europe's remote western edge, Ireland long has been seen as having an artistic heritage that owes little to influences beyond its borders. This publication, the first to focus on Irish art from the eighth century AD to the end of the sixteenth century, challenges the idea that the best-known Irish monuments of that period-the high crosses, the Book of Kells, the Tara Brooch, the round towers-reflect isolated, insular traditions. Seventeen essays examine the iconography, history, and structure of these familiar works, as well as a number of previously unpublished pieces, and demonstrate that they do have a place in the main currents of European art. While this book reveals unexpected links between Ireland, Late-Antique Italy, the Byzantine Empire, and the Anglo-Saxons, its center is always the artistic culture of Ireland itself. It includes new research on the Sheela-na-gigs, often thought to be merely erotic sculptures; on the larger cultural meanings of the Tuam Market Cross and its nineteenth-century re-erection; and on late-medieval Irish stone crosses and metalwork. The emphasis on later monuments makes this one of the first volumes to deal with Irish art after the Norman invasion. The contributors are Cormac Bourke, Mildred Budny, Tessa Garton, Peter Harbison, Jane Hawkes, Colum Hourihane, Catherine E. Karkov, Heather King, Susanne McNab, Raghnall Floinn, Emmanuelle Pirotte, Roger Stalley, Kees Veelenturf, Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk, Niamh Whitfield, Maggie McEnchroe Williams, and Susan Youngs.

Over the past fifty years, Francoise Henry has been the leading authority on the history of early Irish art. A pupil of Henri Focillon, she united two traditions of scholarship, one French and one Irish, and her understanding of the European context within which the art of early Christian Ireland developed has had a profound influence on subsequent research. These three volumes bring together the articles that Dr. Henry published on Irish art and its European links. The first volume is concerned with enamel and metalwork, a field in which the author specialized from the beginning. Emailleurs d'Occident looks at Western enamels, among which the Irish examples figure prominently, and the development of Irish enamelling is treated separately in the following study. Metalwork is also featured, in the form of a number of Dr. Henry's important studies on hanging-bowls, croziers, and chalices. The second volume deals with Irish manuscript illumination. Since a number of the articles reprinted here were published in collaboration with Genevieve Marsh-Micheli, this volume, as Francoise Henry wished, is published as a joint work, and includes an independent article by Mrs. Marsh-Micheli on the Irish manuscripts of St. Gall and Reichenau. The manuscripts dealt with here cover the entire span of Christian Celtic art in Ireland, from the earliest works of the seventh and eighth centuries to the later manuscripts of the period between the Norman Conquest and the final collapse of Gaelic civilisation in Ireland in the late sixteenth century. There are joint studies of Irish manuscripts in Continental and English collections, and a valuable review by Francoise Henry of the facsimile edition of the Book of Lindisfarne. The third volume of Francoise Henry's Studies features her papers on early Christian architecture and sculpture in Ireland. They include one of the author's earliest contributions, Les origines de l'iconographie irlandaise, and the subject of Irish sculpture, particularly the high crosses and cross-slabs, remained one of Francoise Henry's main interests. Her list of dated inscriptions on early Irish graveslabs helps to provide a chronology for this type of monument that is of unique value. The author's studies of the monastic sites represent a particularly valuable contribution to the archaeology of early Christian Ireland. This comprises the results of nearly fifty years of field-work in some of the more inaccessible areas of Ireland. Two of the papers reprinted here carry the study of Irish sculpture into the post-Norman period, with notes on the carved decoration of the Irish Cistercian monasteries, and a figure in Lismore Cathedral.