The Art of the Islands: Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Visual Culture c.350-1050 by Michelle Brown, Bodleian Library: Oxford 2016. 234 pages, softback, £25.00. Reviewed by Douglas Mac Lean.
In The Art of the Islands, Michelle Brown brings to bear a lifetime of distinguished scholarship for a beautifully illustrated volume intended for a general audience. Specialists will disagree over specific matters. 
The introduction accepts long-held views which have been recently challenged. These include non-Indo-European elements in the Pictish language, while Katherine Forsyth’s conclusion that Pictish was P-Celtic now holds sway (Forsyth 1997), along with the invasive extension of ‘Dalriada’ from northeastern Ireland into Argyll, something now doubted in archaeological quarters. Brown’s association of Cruithne to ‘the cat, guardian to the entrance to the other world’ is less convincing than Márkus’ suggestion that Welsh pryd, Gaelic cruth, may indicate the Britons’ (and Picts’) self-perception as a ‘shapely people’ (Márkus 2017: 5).
Brown’s outline of the social organisation of Irish society applies equally to Gaelic Scotland. She also retains the traditional dating of the Book of Kells to c 800 and the Book of Durrow to the second half of the 7th century, ignoring Ian Fisher and Paul Meyvaert linking Kells to the Iona translation of Columba’s relics (c 750) and recent scholarship advancing Durrow into the early 8th century, perhaps contemporary with the date Brown advocates for the Lindisfarne Gospels (Fisher 1982: 47, 1994; Meyvaert 1989).
On the other hand, Brown accepts my unattributed conclusions (Mac Lean 1992, 1993) that Pictish snake-bosses reflect an Iona impetus, while the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Crosses indicate Northumbrian expansion into Rheged in the 8th century. Her erudition on manuscript illumination is apparent throughout, less so on other media. She capably describes the interaction between artistic traditions funneled into Britain through Canterbury and Iona and their interactions with the Picts.
Brown dates Insular art from c 550 into the 9th century. She effortlessly juggles conflicting viewpoints on the dominance of Lindisfarne or Rath Melsigi in the development of illuminated Insular manuscripts, noting that Aldred’s 10th-century Lindisfarne Gospels colophon follows Irish practice in naming ‘patrons and makers’ on inscribed reliquaries. Her tracing of developments from the Book of Durrow through the Book of Kells is serviceable, but a Coptic source for the ‘sideways pose’ of the Kells Virgin is unnecessary; it had already occurred in the Great Palace mosaic of the Byzantine emperors. Nordhagen Links the Kells Virgin to a mid-7th-century fresco in Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome (Nordhagen 1963, 1977), but Brown downplays the Hellenizing-Roman style of Santa Maria Antiqua in favour of Coptic and Ethiopian comparanda. She is, however, particularly good on Insular participation in the contemporary theological interplay between Roman west and Byzantine east. Brown incorporates recent discoveries at Tarbat in her treatment of the development of Pictish art, but sections on the Irish metalwork polychrome style and its continental reflections lack illustrations of significant objects.
The chapter on Southumbrian art and exoticism is of particular interest, especially the author’s recent research on Mount Sinai revealing that at least two English scribes worked there in the 8th century. This provides a preferable explanation to the long reliance on Adomnán of Iona’s putative sojourn of the Frankish Arculf in the Holy Land, which Nees (2014) has now shown to be likely apocryphal.
Brown touches lightly on Anglo-Scandinavian sculpture, delving straight into the cultural affinities and aspirations of Alfred the Great. Her suggestion that Ferdomnach, ‘master scribe’ of the Book of Armagh, was also responsible for the MacDurnan Gospels, once the possession of the 10th-century King Athelstan, is noteworthy. Athelstan’s interaction with the cult of St Cuthbert provides wider context for Aldred’s use of the Northumbrian dialect in his Old-English colophon and glossing of the Lindisfarne Gospels, in a period of local Scandinavian linguistic domination. The Viking presence fractured Insular artistic comity and Brown effectively devotes separate attention to artistic developments in Viking-era Wales, Scotland, Cornwall (with glances at Brittany), the Isle of Man and Ireland.
I have elsewhere addressed the decline of Irish manuscript illumination due to the increasing administrative responsibilities of those responsible for Latin manuscript production and its attendant illumination (Mac Lean 2003-4). The last glorious phase of Anglo-Saxon art, following the 10th-century Benedictine reform, depended instead upon the active participation of Saints Dunstan, Oswald and Ethelwold in the production of illuminated manuscripts and other ecclesiastical art forms. Brown covers English interaction with earlier and contemporary continental art (Carolingian, Ottonian and Flemish) and the effects of renewed Scandinavian incursions in the eleventh century, with a revived interest in Insular art and Anglo-Saxon literature and the involvement of aristocratic female patrons. The book ends with a thoughtful discussion of how the art of the period has since been put to other uses.
Overall, Brown sees greater interdependence between linguistic and cultural groupings once seen as more exclusive during the Insular period, only to be followed by withdrawal later in the period under review. Much the same happened in Muslim Spain towards its sad end, and it is not unlike what is happening in the western world now. Hinton’s recent Antiquaries Journal review addresses copy-editing issues and a few historical mistakes (Hinton 2017), but having once taught Insular art in American colleges and universities, I highly recommend Art of the Islands as a textbook, if used by those trained in the subject.
Douglas Mac Lean completed his Edinburgh PhD under the late John Higgitt’s supervision in 1986; Isabel Henderson was his external examiner. He has published extensively on Insular sculpture, including the early medieval Iona School, Applecross, the date of the Ruthwell Cross and other aspects of Anglo-Saxon art.
References
Fisher, I 1982 Argyll: An Inventory of the Monuments, IV, Iona. Edinburgh: RCAHMS.
Fisher, I 1994 ‘The monastery of Iona in the eighth century’ in O’Mahony, F (ed.) The Book of Kells: Proceedings of a conference at Trinity College, Dublin, 6-9 September 1992. Aldershot: Scolar Press.
Forsyth, K 1997 Language in Pictland: the case against ‘non-Indo-European Pictish’. Utrecht: Stichting Uitgeverij de Keltische Draak.
Hinton, D A 2017 ‘Review: Art of the Islands’, The Antiquaries Journal 97: 317-19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003581517000129
Mac Lean, D 1992 ‘The Date of the Ruthwell Cross’ in Cassidy, B (ed.) The Ruthwell Cross: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art Princeton University 8 December 1989, 49-70. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mac Lean, D 1993 ‘Snake-Bosses and Redemption at Iona and in Pictland’ in Spearman, R M & Higgitt, J (eds) The Age of Migrating Ideas: Early Medieval Art in Britain and Ireland (Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Insular Art held in the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh, 3-6 January 1991), 245-53. Edinburgh and Stroud: National Museums Scotland.
Mac Lean, D 2003-4 ‘Scribe as Artist, not Monk: the Canon Tables of Ailerán “the Wise” and the Book of Kells’, Peritia 17-18: 433-68.
Markus, G 2017 Conceiving a Nation: Scotland to AD 900. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meyvaert, P 1989 ‘The Book of Kells and Iona’, Art Bulletin LXXI (No. 1): 6-19.
Nees, L 2014 ‘Insular Latin Source, “Arculf,” and Early Islamic Jerusalem’ in Frassetto, M, Gabriele, M & Hosler, J D (eds) Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, 174: Where Earth and Heaven Meet: Essays on Medieval Europe in Honor of Daniel F Callahan, 81-100. Leiden: Brill.
Nordhagen, P J 1963 ‘The Mosaics in the Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 56: 53-68.
Nordhagen, P J 1977 ‘The Kells Madonna and the Virgin Eleousa’, in Nordhagen, P J (ed.) The Codex Amiatinus and the Byzantine Element in the Northumbrian Renaissance, 15-18. Jarrow: Parish of Jarrow P C C.