12 Facts About Insular art

Insular art, known as Hiberno-Saxon art, was produced in the post-Roman era of Great Britain and Ireland.

The influence of Insular art affected all subsequent European medieval art, especially in the decorative elements of Romanesque and Gothic manuscripts.

Dodwell, on the other hand, says that in Ireland "the Insular art style continued almost unchallenged until the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1170; indeed examples of it occur even as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries".

Insular art style is most famous for its highly dense, intricate and imaginative decoration, which takes elements from several earlier styles.

The Insular art style arises from the meeting of their two styles, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon animal style, in a Christian context, and with some awareness of Late Antique style.

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The Insular art crozier had a distinctive shape; the survivals, such as the Kells Crozier and Lismore Crozier all appear to be Irish or Scottish, and from rather late in the Insular art period.

Fittings of a major abbey church in the Insular art period remain hard to imagine; one thing that does seem clear is that the most fully decorated manuscripts were treated as decorative objects for display rather than as books for study.

None of the major Insular art manuscripts have preserved their elaborate jewelled metal covers, but we know from documentary evidence that these were as spectacular as the few remaining continental examples.

The Insular art tendency for the decoration to lunge into the text, and take over more and more of it, was a radical innovation.

Panels of interlace and other Insular art motifs continue to be used as one element in borders and frames ultimately classical in derivation.

Later Insular art carvings found throughout Britain and Ireland were almost entirely geometrical, as was the decoration on the earliest crosses.

The mixing of the figurative with the ornamental remained characteristic of all later medieval illumination; indeed for the complexity and density of the mixture, Insular art manuscripts are only rivalled by some 15th-century works of late Flemish illumination.