Gold from the Dark Ages

By ROBERT HUGHES

A trove of early Irish art comes to the U.S.

"You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

Caliban's words to the intruders on his island seem uniquely fitted to one of the bleakest acts of cultural colonization in history: the English subjugation of Ireland, which began with the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169. In the flowering of Irish monastic culture during what were once routinely called the Dark Ages, the visual arts in Ireland had reached a splendor unequaled in the rest of Europe. But war, burning and pillage destroyed most of the relics.

Illuminated codices were ripped apart for the gold in their bindings; bronze corroded; only a few Gospel books and a quantity of gold ornaments--since gold does not oxidize and is incorruptible --survived these ravages. No mainstream of civilization left less behind it than this early climax of Irish culture, which took place between the 6th and 9th centuries A.D. The Irish tradition absorbed the Vikings; it digested the animal motifs and decorative knotwork of Scandinavia; but it could not survive the English. The English Renaissance meant the Irish decadence.

What was lost is the subject of an extraordinary exhibition at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Entitled "Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C.

to 1500 A.D.," it consists of some 59 metal objects--processional crosses, gold torques, chalices, reliquaries, brooches, bell shrines and pins--together with a group of monastic books. This magnificent show, which is scheduled to travel to museums in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston and Philadelphia into 1979, includes very nearly all of the major examples of early Irish art that have remained in Irish collections, a loan of unparalleled generosity. Its only fault, a too common one at the Metropolitan, is the installation--a gross Tiffany-in-Vegas effort, with each item so harshly spotlit that exaggerated shadows break up the intricate gold surfaces, eliding the exquisitely delicate transitions of depth and texture which were the very essence of the Celtic jewelers' art. Everything looks as if it were for sale.

Nonetheless, the works conquer their unfortunate setting. There was never more heroic ornament than the exhibition's massive early Christian torques, with their thick bosses and twisted gold flanges. And it is impossible to imagine a greater virtuosity of technique than the minutely elaborate gold-wire filigree of treasures like the 8th century Tara brooch, or the magnificently precise inlaying, chasing and enameling of the silver Ardagh chalice.

The climax of the show, however, is not gold but vellum. If one were to trace to its source the ancient Irish reverence for language--for the Word as the incarnation of truth, as the fundamental building block of culture and religion--it would surely lie in the great illuminated codices of the 6th to 8th centuries, made and preserved in such monastic communities as Burrow, Kells and Lindisfarne. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God":

so potent was the magical aura attributed to the 7th century Book of Burrow that one detached 17th century visitor watched its guardian monk dipping it, binding and all, into a pail of water to make a miraculous remedy for the monastery's sick cattle. (The cows recovered after drinking the water; the book still carries the stains.) The Metropolitan's exhibition contains not only the Book of Durrow, but also two of the four volumes--Mark and John--that make up the Gospel Book of Kells. This 8th century work, originally housed in the monastery of Kells in County Meath and later moved to Dublin for safekeeping during Cromwell's rape of Ireland, is the most famous illuminated manuscript in the West.

It may have been the product of Irish scribes working in a community vulnerable to the marauding Norsemen on the far, cold Isle of lona. Describing a now lost manuscript whose splendor probably approached that of the Book of Kells, Giraldus Cambrensis, a 12th century scholar, declared: "You will make out intricacies so delicate and subtle, so exact and compact, so full of knots and links, with colors so fresh and vivid, that you might say that all this was the work of an angel, and not of a man." The Book of Kells is and no doubt always will be the most sophisticated work of decorative art in the history of painting.

In some ways the repertoire of the makers of the Book of Kells was extremely limited: a narrow range of pigments, a relatively small number of motifs and, as the Met's catalogue points out, "no tradition of representational art and no background of iconology." But the early Irish monks did have world enough and time. The bare silence of the scriptoria ensured that. Kells remains the stupendous proof of how, under certain conditions, the hermetic life breeds an ecstatic liberty. In its minutely traced webs of knotwork, its dazzling combinations and repetitions, its mazes and meanders, spirals, volutes, in the fishlike stiffness of its human figures and the bizarre twinings and clonings of its decorative monsters, Kells is perhaps art's fullest surviving document of consciousness disporting in its own freedom. -- Robert Hughes

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