Text: Analysis

The sacred text itself was copied in the Book of Kells with a remarkable degree of inaccuracy.  For today’s observer many of the images in the book can be understood only imperfectly.  The current idea that the images could carry composite or ‘multivalent’ meanings even for their artists is an extraordinarily useful but potentially misleading device.  If we bring to texts so rich in interpretive possibilities an original readership which knew scripture well, and artists as skilful and apparently as allusive as those of the Book of Kells, the possibility does occur of several equally plausible interpretations of particular pages or motifs.  Since however there is so little chance that the artists’ intentions can be proved, we are also in danger of coming eventually to the position that the pages mean whatever we want them to mean. (Meehan 30)

 

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Synapses

Network

Design

Author

Pictograph

Foundation

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