Based On The Image Study Of The Three Miniatures In The Book Of Kells

The peak period of the development of Western manuscript illustrations is in the middle ages which is an era without printing and papermaking.Christians created a large number of manuscripts with parchment as the carrier to enable people get in touch with Christianity widely and understand the doctrines in the Bible easily.This kind of manuscript is easy to carry,study and appreciate.It was popular for people to spread and interpret religious doctrines by manuscript at that time.The Book of Kells is the most beautiful one of these manuscripts,which represents the highest achievement of the art of hiberno Saxon in the middle ages.Its novel composition,vibrant lines,complex decoration,diversity of motifs and imagination and symbol of images have attracted much more scholars at home and abroad.However,most scholars seem to pay more attention to its graphic language and adopt the method of Stylistics to study it.Therefore,this paper attempts to take the image research of The Book of Kells as the breakthrough point.In this paper,three miniatures of The Book of Kells are selected as the research objects which are The raised Christ(fol.32v),Christ on the Mount of Olives(fol.114r)and The temptation of Christ(fol.202v).It systematically explains the schema language,theme content,image meaning and work connotation of these three miniatures by the methods of formal analysis,documentation,iconography and so on.As a result,it reveals the aesthetic characteristics and ideological and cultural connotation of the miniatures in The Book of Kells during a specific historical period.