Stylistic originality of a page from the Book of Kells, Folio 114v.

Distinguished by its exquisite carpet and ornamental decorativeness, the Book of Kells undoubtedly represents for us a new type of ambivalent manuscript, emphasizing the ideological differences between the doctrinal teachings of the early Irish church and the Romanesque-Petrine tradition of scriptural interpretation. This compilation is of great interest in the study as a subject of medieval art, revealing the original tone of the insular church tradition in Britain at the beginning of the 8th-9th centuries.

Page folio 114v is a calligraphic depiction of Mt 26:31 “tunc dicit illis Iesus omnes vos scan(dalum)”, which is directly related to folio 114r, where we can observe the scene of the Prayer for the cup. The close connection between the illustrations is emphasized in the identical drawing up of the structural solution by the master, namely in the framing of the images in squares. It is also worth highlighting the columns, which again highlight the unity of the semantic beginning of these two illustrations. Folio 114v can be divided into two registers, where the first of them testifies to the skillful execution and artistic consciousness of the master: the letter not only becomes part of the main illustration, as if decorating it for the second time and complementing the decorative effect, but also independently completes the composition of the page, creating an amazing combination of colors, shapes and tones in a single space. Openwork and floral motifs, often bearing not only an artistic but also a semantic character, are boldly recreated through the entire corpus of illustrations and miniatures. The second register refers us already to the very message of Jesus Christ, where the color takes on a contextual character and shifts to the periphery. So, often when interpreting certain medieval manuscripts, researchers turn to color symbolism, namely, to the conscious identification of the principles of the divine and human in Christ with the way the evangelists directly represented him. The color palette and the dominance of gold and purple, sometimes turning into purple-red, here more confidently refer us to the human nature of Jesus Christ, to which the apostle Matthew directly addressed. The refined calligraphy of the text of the second register is complemented by a geometric pattern in several rows.

The ambivalence I mentioned earlier refers to the contrasting decision to show the differences between the behavior of the apostles Peter, James and John in the episode of the Agony in Gethsemane. Comparing the prophecy of Jesus Christ with the visual description of the New Testament plot, the master of this illustrative series recreates the original symbolic designations, but focuses our attention on the theme of the denial of the Apostle Peter and the place of this event in the context of folio 114rv.