The Virgin and Child

The story

The only image of a woman in the entire Book of Kells, and the oldest known image of the Virgin and Child to survive in Western book art. Mary sits in an odd hybrid of frontal and three-quarter pose, flanked by four angels bearing flabella, with a panel of six small heads breaking the frame at right — scholars still debate their meaning. The iconography likely descends from an Eastern or Coptic icon type carried west along the pilgrim and trade routes that connected early Insular monasticism to the wider Christian world. Notice how the interlace patterning on Mary's robe echoes the knotwork bordering the whole page, as though her garment and the manuscript's own ornament are made of the same sacred thread. It prefaces the Gospel of Matthew's genealogy — the first Christian portrait most Irish eyes would ever have seen.