Word: knotwork
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...since gold does not oxidize and is incorruptible -survived these ravages. No mainstream of civilization left less behind it than this early climax of Irish culture, which took place between the 6th and 9th centuries A.D. The Irish tradition absorbed the Vikings; it digested the animal motifs and decorative knotwork of Scandinavia; but it could not survive the English. The English Renaissance meant the Irish decadence...
...representational art and no background of iconology." But the early Irish monks did have world enough and time. The bare silence of the scriptoria ensured that. Kells remains the stupendous proof of how, under certain conditions, the hermetic life breeds an ecstatic liberty. In its minutely traced webs of knotwork, its dazzling combinations and repetitions, its mazes and meanders, spirals, volutes, in the fishlike stiffness of its human figures and the bizarre twinings and clonings of its decorative monsters, Kells is perhaps art's fullest surviving document of consciousness disporting in its own freedom. - Robert Hughes
| 1 |