Bestiary in the “Book of Kells”: an Animal Ornament or Symbolic Images?

Abstract

The article deals with the analysis of animal images in the famous Old Irish Gospel of the 8th century —  the Book of Kells. The authors propose to distinguish between the tree types of animal images: canonical images of the evangelists in the form of animals, ornamental and denominated as iconic. Ornamental images of animals have parallels in Germanic animal style. Germanic animal style became widespread in the West and was used in Mediaeval manuscripts. Animals depicted in that style are often distorted, elongated and sometimes unrecognizable. The other type of animal images are the so‑called line‑fillers. They are considered to be an invention of insular manuscript art. In the Book of Kells such images occur frequently. They may be dogs or cats or fishes or even humans. Those images tend to be kind of realistic ones and can be in a way considered to be precursors of Mediaeval Bestiaries. The authors pay special attention to the images of cats which can also be divided into ornamental and realistic ones. The article analyses pictures treating one and the same subject: a cat is hunting a mouse with a stolen wafer in its mouth. The authors show that such pictures, on the one hand, refer to the real monastic everyday life, yet on the other hand, they may have profound symbolic meaning.