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    Insular Art Forms: Their Essence and Construction
    Insular Art Forms: Their Essence and Construction
    Insular Art Forms: Their Essence and Construction
    Ebook228 pages3 hours

    Insular Art Forms: Their Essence and Construction

    By Robert Stevick

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    About this ebook

    Dr. Robert Stevick's Insular Art Forms: Their Essence and Construction emerges as the most innovative work of his long and illustrious career. Building on years of research into medieval manuscript design and construction, Stevick has produced a masterpiece examining the ingenious ways in which insular scribes used geometry and mathematics to produce complex and beautiful designs. In addition to a detailed academic description of these processes, Stevick provides videos clearly illustrating the methods he describes, and materials for practical hands-on recreation of their methods. Insular Art Forms is the only guide that offers both a true scholarly study of these methods and the means for modern readers to reproduce them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWitan Publishing
    Release dateJan 17, 2013
    ISBN9781386148890
    Insular Art Forms: Their Essence and Construction

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      Book preview

      Insular Art Forms - Robert Stevick

      Table of Contents

      About This Book

      Acknowledgements

      Proem

      Inventory of Essentials

      2.1 Tools

      2.2 Configurations

      2.3 Ratios

      2.4 On the Rôle of the Compass

      Setting the Basic Ratios

      3.1 'Arithmetical' ratios

      3.2 'Geometrical' ratios

      Creating Coherent Geometrical Designs

      4.1 Tests of Coherence

      4.2 A Motif-piece

      4.3 Ringed Crosses (1)

      4.4 Ringed Crosses (2)

      4.5 Metalwork (1)

      4.6 Metalwork (2)

      4.7 Metalwork (3)

      4.8 'Carpet' Pages

      4.9 Verse Texts

      Some Antecedents and Follow-Ons

      5.1 A La Tène Bronze Disc and an Irish High Cross

      5.2 A Bronze Disc and a Processional Cross

      5.3 A Celtic Shield and An Early Lunula

      Some Retrospective Observations

      6.1 Unit of Measure

      6.2 Binaries

      6.3 Syntax and Alphabet

      6.4 Assumptions

      6.5 Figure and Ground

      6.6 Forms and Fillers

      6.7 Copying

      List of Figures

      About This Book

      This is a practical guide to understanding—by re-creating—the forms of outstanding artwork of the early Insular tradition. Its intention is to explicate principles which underlie designs that have fascinated viewers for a thousand years and more. Such treasures as the Tara Brooch and the Lindisfarne Gospels, as well as the early ringed stone crosses and Anglo-Saxon verse texts, belong to the 'Insular' tradition, evolved in Ireland and England, seventh through tenth centuries.

      A lengthening series of discoveries has demonstrated the formal plans of the best pieces of Insular jewelery, 'carpet' pages, stone sculpture, and long poems to have a common source: they are all generated by a constructional cumulative geometry. Simply, compass and straight-edge are the tools to produce configurations which are conceived by rules for achieving total coherence of proportions within the forms. The designs are then executed by hand with astonishing accuracy whether on parchment, in stone, or in metal. The parchment leaves preserve direct evidence (long neglected) of the designers' tools and procedures. The designs belong to an art that is pleasing to both eye and intellect.

      Demonstrations of the method of designing have appeared in separate publications over the past thirty years or so, beginning in papers on the formal divisions of long poems in Old English, on religious topics. Those divisions in the unique manuscripts had never been accounted for satisfactorily, explanations ranging through impressionistic guesses about scribal stints, duration of poetic inspiration, size of parchment leaves (or wax tablets) used in original composition or in transcribing of oral performance, pause points for reading in refectory or cell, and so on. No one had attempted to correlate any of the sectional divisions of a text with the other sectional divisions of that same text: that is, no one asked whether the sectional divisions manifested a formal scheme for the whole text in which they occurred. Once the metrical linecounts were set in full array, a web of related ratios could be recognised, and a coherent form unifying all of the 'irregular' sectional lengths became apparent. The striking thing was that the numerical ratios that linked into a comprehensive schema for a text were functions of extremely fine numerical approximations to basic geometrical ratios involving √2, √3, √5, along with 1, 2, 3.

      The next step was fairly obvious: to examine the formal features of carpet pages of the same culture of literacy, with their squares and rectangles and interlace, to see whether there were similarities or analogous patterns. From this followed other papers on carpet pages in the principal illuminated Gospels codices. Designs of these pages embodied and interwove the same simple ratios, found when measures 1 and 2 are combined in straight and right angles, that dominate the framed illuminations: 1, 2, 3, √2, √3, √5. These pages—besides their extraordinary intrinsic interest—became a tool for studying the sectional divisions of texts. The graphic expression of the ratios in the carpet-pages provided a most useful analog to the verse-text forms. If 'geometrical' ratios among sectional groups in literary texts were now obvious, there was still a question of how they could have been planned and executed, especially in interlocking patterns. The graphic forms showed the way to finding an answer to that question, and particularly because construction marks in the parchment leaves took some of the guesswork out of reconstructing how the graphic forms had been devised. And so the papers on divisions in poetic texts and the lengthening series of papers on page design became a dynamic enterprise, study of either one of the art forms leading to more precise and persuasive study of the other.

      That was where things stood in 1994 when I gathered and synthesised these parallel studies in The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts: Visual and Poetic Forms before A.D. 1000. Then a third art form came to my attention, the early sculptured crosses of Ireland. Slowly, one after another of these extraordinary artefacts were found answering to the same kind of formal analysis, as had the texts of English religious poems and the illuminations of the Gospels texts of Kells, Lindisfarne, Echternach, St. Gall, and others. They seem to belong to a period—in their first development, anyway—between the illuminated pages and the poetic texts. Again a series of papers followed, explicating the forms of a number of these crosses. And again, the further analyses entered into dynamic relationship with the two series that had preceded them. Other embodiments of the key ratios became apparent,

      After these, at the prompting of someone who had seen some of the earlier studies, I began to examine designs in some of the fine metalwork. Its tradition precedes the objects in all three of the other art forms mentioned above. Very slowly—since there were no overt right angles outside or inside the forms to anchor the analyses—the formal schemes of two superb pieces became obvious, built from the same simple ratios and methods as were the others; papers on two famous brooches, Tara and Hunterston, have demonstrated plans more elegant than those of crosses and verse texts, and equal to the very best illuminated page designs. They enhanced still further the understanding of the forms in the other media.

      It was through serendipity, perhaps, that still further objects were then discovered to have designs with the very same fundamentals: some pieces of La Tène metalwork more than a millenium earlier than the brooches, the crosses, the illuminated pages, and the poems. Then a well known British Celtic piece, the Battersea Shield, was found to follow the same principles of designing, though with some clear differences. Papers on these have begun to appear. Their contribution to understanding the tradition of designing so far has been primarily in making obvious how simply the designing of an Iron Age disc, for example, can be adapted to designing a ringed stone cross ten long-hundred years later. The Insular tradition of designing had deep indigenous taproots. And there are artefacts such as the Cross of Cong and the St Patrick's Bell shrine to show the Insular tradition had follow-ons as well as antecedents, within a long, sweeping, smooth evolution. Papers on these have begun to appear.

      So at this point, the fundamentals of early Insular designing can be made more accessible to others, I believe, if the tools, ratios, configurations, and procedures are laid out in a systematic way. When understood, they will facilitate study of design in newly discovered archives, or in a boxfull of major artefacts recovered from a fresh dig—or design in innumerable treasures already catalogued and published. The pages that follow can be thought of as a handbook for designing within this singular tradition. They do not over interpretations of designs, divinations of their putative meanings. It has always been easy to make analyses that are incomplete, inept, over-wrought, or otherwise deserving to be dismissed. The wonderful thing about this early tradition of art, on the other hand, is that once its conceptual basis is grasped, it is hard to make mistakes in analysis of individual works, so long as analysis is rigorous and

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