Serpents of the Beatitudes: The Book of Kells Text, Part 2

The Blessings or "Beati" of the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew have an interesting totem pole of figures making up the initial capital B's:

Folio 40v: Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew

We can translate the blessings and see if there is any relation between the figures of the totem pole and the text of the Book of Kells:




The first four B figures have the heads and feet of men but are entangled with a bird, possibly a peacock.  There is a progression in footware, with the first figure barefoot, the next with one sock, the next again with two socks, and the fourth figure with what look like boots or shoes:

It's hard to see what this entangled figure and his footware have to do with the blessings, but by the fifth beatitude the man and bird tussle has been replaced with the head of a beast and a figure that comes more and more to resemble a serpent:

The Serpents of the Book of Kells are by no means all symbols of evil.  A serpent can renew itself by shedding its skin and this made it a symbol of resurrection and rebirth.  In fact, if we look carefully at the serpent above, we see that the skin seems to be getting old and segmented until in the final frame it has been shed and renewed. 

FutureLearn in partnership with Trinity College, Dublin provides a page about the Book of Kells and its...

Intertwined men and animals

 

The Physiologus (~200 AD) mentioned on this page was a famous Christian bestiary that exerted a huge influence during medieval times.  It offered a detailed examination of the serpent and its largely positive Christian import.  A public domain translation is included in the Epic of the Beast by William Rose, which is available for reading and downloading at the Internet Archives:

Physiologus:  the Serpent

Exploring the Book of Kells Text

Often one gets so enthralled with the full page illuminations that one ignores the text of the Book of Kells, but there is much to explore on the text pages as well.

 The Kells alphabet:

FutureLearn in co-operation with Trinity College, Dublin has an informative page on the...

 Script in the Book of Kells

Trinity College also provides a video about the...

Calligraphy in the Book of Kells 

It is helpful to familiarize oneself with this lettering in order to better understand what use is made of it in the Book of Kells.  As well as this lettering, there are the more ornate or geometrical letters used in the decorative pages or at the start of verses.

Early in the Book of Kells, we find a number of pages called Breves Causae that summarize events recorded in the gospels.  These summary pages use a wide variety of capital letter forms, many of which will recur in variations within the Gospels themselves:

Folio 8r: Breves causae (summaries of events recorded in each Gospel) of Matthew

Folio 104r gives us the text of the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 24, Verses 19-24

Gospel of Matthew Chapter 24: 19-24

The Catholic Bible Online has the Latin of the Vugate version as well as translations in English from two other well known bibles:

We combined the Kells page, the Vulgate Latin and the English translation:

 We can see that the whimsical capitals are at the start of each verse and looking at the translated text lets us speculate on how the capitals may relate to the content of the verse.  It looks like the SU of the last verse resembles an upside down church steeple with watchful eyes above it:

   
This would be in accord with the text that warns of false Christs and false prophets. 


Likewise, the E figure which begins the 21st verse about great tribulation looks to be caught up in tribulations himself:

The bird located above the text of Verse 23 on this page (104r) has mystified the experts, but...

Peacocks were associated with Christ 

as noted on Ashley Jane Leonard's excellent Kells web site.

Peacocks are found throughout the Book of Kells, but on closer examination, this pseudo-peacock seems to have a false tail and so may be meant to suggest the false Christs that this text from the Gospel of Matthew is warning about:

The word "Christ" and its variants are often abbreviated in the text of the Book of Kells and these abbreviations usually have an indication mark above them.  In Verses 23 and 24 on this page we see abbreviation indications above the words 'Christus' and 'Christi' that are abbreviated as 'XPS' and "XPI":

Alfredo M Graphic Arts Studio has published a fascinating collection of illuminated capital letters from the Book of Kells and you can browse through all the graphics from this book online:

 160 Illuminated Initials and Writing Tools

 Here is a sample page for the letter T:
 

Proceed to the next Kells post:  Serpents of the Beatitudes - Exploring the Kells Text Part 2

Index to the Most Famous Pages of the Book of Kells:

Here is an index for going quickly to the best known pages of the Book of Kells:

Folio 7v: Virgin and Child with angels
 

 
Folio 27v: Gospel of Matthew: Symbols of the four Evangelists

Folio 28v: Portrait of Matthew

 

 

Folio 32v: Portrait of Christ (the Doubtful Portrait)

   

 

Folio 33r: Carpet page (double-armed cross with eight roundels set in a frame)

Folio 34r: 1.18 Christi autem generatio, the conception: the Chi Rho page

Folio 40v: Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew

Folio 114r: 26.30 Et ymno dicto exierunt in montem oliueti (‘And a hymn being said, they went out unto Mount Olivet’): Jesus on the Mount of Olives

Folio 124r: 27.38 Tunc crucifixerant xpi cum eo du/os latrones (‘Then were crucified with him two thieves’)

Folio 129v: Gospel of Mark: Symbols of the four Evangelists

Folio 130r: Mark I.I: Init/ium euangel/lii Jesu/Christi (‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ’)

Folio 183r: 15.25: Erat / autem / hora tercia (‘And it was the third hour’): the Crucifixion.

Folio 188r: Gospel of Luke: Luke I.I Quoniam (’Foramuch as’)

 
Folios 200r-202r: 3.22-38 Genealogy of Jesus
   

Folios 202r: Concludes Genealogy of Jesus with an infinity/eternity tailpiece

Folio 202v: Temptation of Jesus in the temple featuring the devil

Folio 203r: 4.1: Iesus / autem / plenus / spiritus / sancto (‘And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost’)

Folio 285r:  Gospel of Luke,Entombment of the body of Jesus - Ouroboros

Folio 290v: Gospel of John,Symbols of the four Evangelists

Folio 291v: Gospel of John, Portrait of John and someone standing behind!

Folio 292r: I.I: In p/rinvi/pio erat uer/bum [et] uer[b]um (‘In the beginning was the Word, and in the Word [was with God]’)

Proceed to the next Kells post:  Artists of the Book of Kells
 

                             

Artists of the Book of Kells

In the second volume of her ground breaking and monumental study of Irish art, Francoise Henry examines the Book of Kells and distinguishes in it the work of four main artists.  This gives us a way to explore the various elements of illustration in the Book of Kells.

 Irish Art during the Viking Invasions

The first artist Francoise Henry calls The Goldsmith:

 One feels tempted to call him 'the Goldsmith', for his work at first sight seems wrought in precious metals, in enamel and niello. He composes a page by drawing a few wide patterns, the irregular shape of letters or the outline of the cross, in broad bands of golden yellow, silvery blue, purple or red. Inside these legible frames, out of them, around them, flows in a continuous stream a fantastic decoration of minute spirals endlessly interlocked with each other, animal bodies plaited and knit, snakes twisted into patterns of eight, little men so ingeniously folded and bent inside a circle that they look like geometrical figures gone crazy. The delicacy of his work is incredible.
(Irish Art II, p. 72)

What most consider the best and most distinctive of the Goldsmith's work is the Chi Rho Page (34r) and it does indeed give a sense of detailed metal work:
 

Folio 34r: 1.18 Christi autem generatio, the conception: the Chi Rho page

The second artist Francoise Henry calls the Portrait Painter:
  
  Another painter was the official portraitist of the Book. He made the two big figures of Evangelists, that of the teaching Christ and perhaps those of the symbols in square frames and the ‘Quoniam’ at the beginning of the Gospel of St Luke. He seems to have been trained in the same methods of ornamentation as the Goldsmith. He works as minutely when he chooses, but without the poetical meandering virtuosity of his colleague.(Irish Art II, p. 75)

What Francoise Henry calls the the portrait of the teaching Christ is usually now known as the Doubtful Portrait (32v) since experts are divided as to whether it is meant to represent Christ or is a misplaced portrait of one of the other evangelists:

Folio 32v: Portrait of Christ

The third artist, Francoise Henry calls the Illustrator.  Our previous artist, the Portrait Painter...

  cuts a rather tame figure beside the Illustrator, the wild, erratic painter who made the Arrest, the Temptation. the Virgin and Child, the ‘Tunc crucifixerant’ and probably the symbols at the beginning of St John’s Gospel. This artist does not pause much over the niceties of elaborate ornament. He cares nothing for beautiful architectural frames. He casually weaves a few ferocious-looking beasts in a border, twists luxurious branches sprouting out of a vase, sets two lions snarling at the keystone of an arch or on the side of a frame, and knots another one into the shape of a T.  His notion of colour sets one’s teeth on edge. (Irish Art II, p. 75)

The Illustrator provides the only appearance of the devil in the Book of Kells in the Temptation of Jesus at the Temple:

  Folio 202v: Temptation of Jesus

And indeed, the devil looks to have been burnt to a crisp in hellfire:

 One of the Illustrator's most famous works is The Virgin and Child (7v), which is considered to be the only such depiction to be found in the early gospel manuscripts:

Folio 7v: Virgin and Child with angels

 Francoise Henry gives no characterizing name to the fourth artist, but following her lead a later explorer of the Kells, Harry Ades, calls him the Joker:

 Beside these chief painters, there is a very attractive fourth who has composed little more than one or two big pages...but who has displayed all his graceful fantasy and his dashing verve in many of the small capitals, in the cartouches of the text, in the border of the Genealogy, and in the animals drawn between the lines. He has certainly collaborated with the Goldsmith and added the little animal scenes in the big Chi-Rho page. He is a fastidious draughtsman. He combines a delightfully smiling sense of observation where shape is concerned with a breathless impetuosity in the description of movement. He sketches with a sharp pen cats, cocks and hens, a goat, a greyhound, all roaming through the pages, draws a horseman riding over a word, a warrior with a shield and spear sitting on a line, a cormorant nesting on top of a letter. Thanks to him there is a note of everyday life in that haughty universe of the Book of Kells.  (Irish Art II, p. 76)

The Joker is believed to have added such touches as the cat and mice (or some think kittens) on the Goldsmith's Chi Rho Page (34r)

He is also believed to have added some visual interest to the Genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke:  the whimsical totem pole of first letters of all the begats (Q  “Qui fuit”) and the soldier in the bottom right:  

 Folios 200r-202r: 3.22-38 Genealogy of Jesus

Proceed to the next Book of Kells Post:  Exploring the Book of Kells Text

Exploring the Book of Kells

 At the beginning of the 20th century, one of the key books about the Book of Kells was the study by Sir Edward Sullivan (1920) which contained page prints of excellent quality for the time along with Sullivan's exuberant commentary.  This book is now in the public domain and is available to browse through or download at the Internet Archives:

The Book of Kells by Sir Edward Sullivan

 

Many people have contemplated the illuminations of the Book of Kells through Sullivan's book and found inspiration there.  James Joyce carried Sullivan's book all over Europe with him:

FutureLearn and Trinity College, Dublin provides an excellent page on 

James Joyce and the Book of Kells 

 
Nowadays you can look at every page of the Book of Kells online and zoom in on all the details.  This amazing digital version is provided by the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library, Trinity College Dublin:

Book of Kells Online

In studying the Book of Kells it is customary, as with most manuscripts, to refer to each physical page as a leaf or folio, and to distinguish the recto (or front) and the verso (or back) of the sheet.  So in looking at the online Book of Kells you have a number for each folio or physical page followed by an r or a v for recto or verso.

In our previous Kells post The Beautiful and Mysterious Book of Kells, we looked at the 67th page, called the Chi Rho Page.   For the online version, we would find this page called Folio 34r, meaning the recto or front of the 34th sheet:

We can zoom in on the cats and mice and save a fine quality image:

  If we zoom in on the Celtic interweave pattern near the top right of the page, we see that it has the head of a bird:

So Trinity College, Dublin has generously provided us with a fine tool for exploring the Book of Kells and making our own collection of images for personal viewing, both full page and zoomed in to intricate detail.

Here is an link to the set of books I found particularly helpful in my own exploration of the Book of Kells:

Ten Great Books about the Book of Kells

   

And here is a link to the...

Index to the most famous pages of the Book of Kells