How Did They Make the Book of Kells?
Inside the creation of a masterpiece 1,200 years ago
Around the year 800, there was no paper mill, no printing press, no tube of paint and no electric light.
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Yet somewhere in the monastic world of the British Isles, a small group of people began creating a book of astonishing ambition.
They prepared hundreds of sheets of animal skin.
They ruled them by hand.
They copied the four Gospels letter by letter.
They manufactured colours from plants, minerals and other materials.
And then, across hundreds of pages, they constructed one of the most intricate visual worlds ever created inside a book.
More than twelve centuries later, we call it the Book of Kells.
But how was something this extraordinary actually made?
First, they needed 159 calves
Before a single word could be written, they needed something to write on.
The Book of Kells was not made on paper.
Its pages are vellum — prepared calfskin. It is estimated that the surviving manuscript required the skins of approximately 159 calves.
That number alone gives some idea of the scale of the undertaking.
Each skin had to be transformed from an animal hide into a surface fine enough to receive extraordinarily delicate writing and decoration.
The skin was cleaned and prepared, stretched and worked until it became a thin, relatively smooth writing surface.
But vellum is never completely uniform.
Look closely at an early medieval manuscript and the material itself reveals variations: changes in colour and texture, imperfections, differences between the hair and flesh sides of the skin.
The artists of Kells were not working on an industrially manufactured surface.
Every page began as part of an animal.
And hundreds of those pages had to be prepared before the manuscript we know today could exist.
Then came the words
The Book of Kells contains the four Gospels in Latin, principally based on the Vulgate, together with prefatory material including canon tables, Gospel summaries and introductions to the Evangelists.
The text was written in insular majuscule, a highly accomplished script characteristic of the manuscript culture of Britain and Ireland.
But this was not the work of a single hand.
Analysis identifies four principal scribes involved in copying the text. Their individual habits can still be distinguished more than a millennium later.
One appears to have concentrated on writing, leaving spaces for another person to decorate.
Another used brilliant colours within the text itself.
Different hands.
Different habits.
One book.
And they were not infallible.
They made mistakes
This may be one of the most human aspects of the Book of Kells.
For all its magnificence, its text contains errors.
Words were omitted.
Passages were repeated.
A scribe's eye could jump from one occurrence of a word to another, causing part of a sentence to disappear.
In one extraordinary case, text already copied onto one page was copied again on the next. Instead of simply scraping it away, the unwanted passage was elegantly marked with red crosses.
It is easy to look at the Book of Kells today as an almost supernatural object.
But details like these remind us that it was made by people.
People working for countless hours.
People concentrating.
People becoming tired.
People making mistakes — and finding beautiful ways to correct them.
And then came the artists
The writing alone would have produced an extraordinary manuscript.
But Kells became something else.
Letters begin to grow.
They twist into animals.
Human heads emerge from initials.
Snakes and birds become lines.
Lines become knots.
Knots disappear into other knots.
Tiny figures occupy spaces that can be difficult to appreciate with the naked eye.
Entire pages become visual labyrinths.
Experts have identified three principal artists behind the major decorated pages, although the exact relationship between the scribes and artists remains one of the manuscript's unanswered questions.
One of those artists was responsible for work of such extraordinary delicacy that his skill has been compared to that of a goldsmith.
And nowhere is that more apparent than on the manuscript's most famous page.
The Chi Rho page
The opening of Matthew 1:18 begins with three Greek letters:
ΧΡΙ — Chi, Rho, Iota.
They form the beginning of the word Christi.
In an ordinary manuscript, they could simply have been written as letters.
In the Book of Kells, they explode across the page.
The enormous Chi dominates the composition. Around and inside it is an almost impossible concentration of spirals, knots, animals, human figures and minute ornament.
The closer you look, the more the page reveals.
A detail that initially appears to be decoration becomes an animal.
A line becomes a body.
A curve becomes another creature.
The eye can wander through the page almost indefinitely.
Trinity describes folio 34r, the Chi Rho page, as perhaps the single most famous page in medieval art.
And all of it was created by hand.
Where did those colours come from?
This is where the making of Kells becomes even more fascinating.
Its artists could not order pigments.
They had to make them.
Scientific analysis at Trinity College Dublin has helped identify the materials responsible for some of the manuscript's extraordinary palette.
The blues appear to have come from indigo or woad.
The brilliant yellow included orpiment, an arsenic sulphide mineral.
Reds included red lead as well as organic colourants.
Greens included a copper-based pigment.
Purple could be produced from lichen.
For years, one particularly romantic story was repeated about the manuscript: that its blue came from lapis lazuli transported over enormous distances from Asia.
Modern scientific examination has challenged that idea.
Trinity's research indicates that lapis lazuli was probably not used.
In a way, the reality is more impressive.
The artists did not require an exotic stone brought halfway across the known world.
They transformed materials available to them into something extraordinary.
They mixed colours
The artists did more than apply individual pigments.
They combined and layered them.
Scientific examination has found areas where as many as three pigments were applied over a base layer, creating visual effects considerably more sophisticated than a simple application of flat colour.
This helps explain something that photographs do not always communicate.
Kells is not simply colourful.
Its colour has structure.
Different tones sit beside and over one another. Tiny areas of contrasting pigment make details vibrate visually. Purple, yellow, red, green and blue interact across the page.
And all of this was being calculated more than a millennium before modern colour printing.
But where is the gold?
Look at the Book of Kells and it can seem as though it must contain gold.
Surprisingly, the effect of preciousness did not depend on covering its pages with gold leaf.
The artists instead used colour, contrast and astonishingly intricate ornament to create an object that could visually evoke the brilliance of metalwork.
That connection is important.
The Book of Kells did not emerge in isolation.
Its visual language belongs to a world that also produced elaborately worked metal objects, stone sculpture and other Insular manuscripts.
Some pages almost seem less painted than constructed like jewellery.
The manuscript is a book.
But visually, at moments, it behaves like a reliquary.
How long did it take?
We do not know.
No workshop account survives telling us when work began, how many hours were spent on a particular page or exactly how labour was divided.
And any precise estimate would be speculation.
But consider what survives.
340 folios.
680 pages.
Hundreds of thousands of handwritten characters.
Elaborate initials.
Interlinear drawings.
Portraits.
Full-page compositions.
Decoration so minute that individual elements can be difficult to distinguish without magnification.
Every line made by hand.
Every letter made by hand.
Every colour prepared and applied by hand.
Whatever the precise amount of time involved, this was not simply the copying of a text.
It was an undertaking on a monumental scale.
And then there are the details almost nobody would see
This may be the most extraordinary aspect of all.
Some decoration in the Book of Kells is enormous.
Other decoration is almost absurdly small.
Artists invested immense effort in details that only someone examining the manuscript from very close range could fully appreciate.
Why?
The book was probably intended as a prestigious Gospel book for important liturgical or ceremonial occasions rather than as an ordinary volume for everyday reading.
Much of its finest workmanship may therefore never have been visible to most of the people present when it was used.
Yet the artists made it anyway.
Perhaps that tells us something fundamental about the object.
The work did not need a human audience for every detail.
The act of making it mattered.
Four scribes. Three artists. No names.
We know something about the hands.
But not the people.
Analysis distinguishes four principal scribes and three artists responsible for the major decorated pages.
Yet we cannot attach a secure name to any of them.
They created one of the most famous books in existence and disappeared anonymously into history.
No signature on the Chi Rho page.
No portrait saying: I made this.
No account of the years spent creating it.
Only the work remains.
There is something fitting about that.
The Book of Kells has become famous throughout the world.
Its makers did not.
1,200 years later
Today, the manuscript consists of 340 surviving folios — 680 pages — measuring approximately 33 × 25.5 cm.
Some leaves have disappeared over the centuries; it is estimated that around 30 folios were lost during the medieval and early modern periods.
The surviving pages have passed through more than twelve centuries of history.
Yet we can still see the movement of a scribe's pen.
We can still see where a mistake was corrected.
We can still examine the pigments an artist mixed.
We can still follow a line as it becomes an animal, disappears beneath another line and emerges somewhere else on the page.
That may be the most extraordinary thing about the Book of Kells.
The people who made it vanished more than a thousand years ago.
Their hands are still visible.
THE BOOK OF KELLS — XL EDITION
More than twelve centuries after the manuscript was created, Galobart is reproducing its 680 surviving pages at the scale of the original Book of Kells.
The XL Edition is hand-bound in genuine leather and accompanied by an English study volume, ten Collector's Art Prints and a monumental presentation case inspired by the medieval Irish cumdach.
Only 68 individually numbered copies will be created.
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