The Book of Kells

800 AD: The most famous illuminated manuscript in the world, made around 800 AD and unfinished to this day.

The Book of Kells is a copy of the four gospels in Latin, written and painted on vellum around the year 800. It is the best known object to survive from early Christian Ireland, and for a long time it was credited to Colm Cille himself. That is no longer accepted: the script it is written in did not develop until well after his death in 597.

Where it was made is still argued over. The likeliest accounts have it begun in the scriptorium on Iona, the island monastery off the Scottish coast founded by Colm Cille, and finished at Kells in Co. Meath, or else made at one place and carried to the other. What pushed the monks is not in doubt. Iona was raided by Vikings from 794 onwards, and the community moved what it could, and whom it could, to the safer inland house at Kells.

The book runs to 340 folios of calf vellum, which is several hundred animals, and it was never finished. Some pages are complete to a degree that still defeats the eye at close range. Others break off mid decoration, outlines drawn and never filled, as though the work stopped one afternoon and was not taken up again.

It left Kells in 1654, sent to Dublin for safe keeping while Cromwell's army was quartered in the town, and it was presented to Trinity College in 1661 by Henry Jones, then bishop of Meath. It has been there ever since, and it is on display still, a page or two at a time.