Irish Art Exhibit Opens in Bellarmine Musuem

Kelly Pierce/The Mirror

The Bellarmine Museum of Art at Fairfield University is  home to the new art exhibit “Kells to Clonmacnoise: Medieval Irish Art in Context,” which features several valuable replicas and reproductions of important Irish works of art.

On Monday, April 18, Fairfield debuted the exhibit with an opening reception in Bellarmine Hall.  The university provided refreshments for patrons to enjoy in the Great Hall before proceeding to the lower level gallery to browse the pieces. The reception was well-attended by members of the Fairfield community, who were excited about the unique opportunity to examine such important pieces of Irish art.

Dr. Marice Rose, assistant professor and director of the art history program at Fairfield University, is particularly enthusiastic about the exhibit.  She played an important role in its realization by providing copious amounts of research on each of items in the exhibit and writing the accompanying brochure.

“I find these objects fascinating because they show the creativity of the medieval Irish monks who made them,” said Rose.  She continued, “[They are] also linked to the 19th century Celtic Revival, when Irish cultural objects were often reproduced as political propaganda to show support of Irish independence.”

One of the most notable pieces in the exhibit is a facsimile Book of Kells, a seventh century work that was the “most lavish of all the Irish gospel books from the Medieval period,” according to the exhibit brochure. This facsimile is one of fewer than 1,500 editions which were produced by Faksimile Verlag in Switzerland in the late 1900s.

Because the original Book of Kells is too fragile to unbind or copy by normal means, Verlag developed a new technique which used suction to flatten and photograph the pages without touching them. Verlag then printed the images onto paper that closely imitated the original vellum pages of the Book of Kells, thickness and worm-holes included.

Rose said that Fairfield’s edition of this artwork was donated in 1990 by The Wild Geese Foundation of Greenwich, a group which promotes and supports Irish history and culture.  The original Book of Kells is held in the Trinity College Dublin.

The exhibit also includes four items on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. These items are replicas of some of the most important Irish metalworks of the medieval period: the Ardagh Chalice (ca. 700-800), the Corzier of Clonmacnoise (ca. 1100), the Cross of Cong (1123), and the Shrine of Saint Lachtin’s Arm (1118-1121). The National Museum in Dublin houses the originals of each of these items.

The objects’ stunning designs and intricate details were not lost or diminished during replication. Rather, the replicas were made through a chemical complex process called electrotyping which yields nearly exact copies of the original works.

The exhibit promises to be interesting and enlightening in spite of its small size. “Although the exhibition comprises only five objects,” said Rose, “Dr. [Jill] Deupi, the museum director, has put together an interdisciplinary slate of programming that truly puts the art in ‘context’ in several different ways.”

One of these programs is a gallery talk provided by Rose at noon on Tuesday, May 3, in the Meditz Gallery of the Bellarmine Art Museum.  In this lecture, Rose plans to explain the “exhibition’s art historical significance.”

Other upcoming noteworthy events include the screening of Academy Award Nominated animated film “The Secret of Kells,” and the gallery talk “Cú Chulainn and Company – An Introduction to Medieval Irish Literature” provided by Associate Professor of English Dr. Robert Epstein. The film will be screened in the Multimedia Room of the DiMenna-Nyselius Library at 7 p.m. on April 20, and Epstein’s lecture will take place in the Meditz Gallery from 3:30-4:30 p.m. on April 27.

The “Kells to Clonmacnoise: Medieval Irish Art in Context” exhibit will run until May 24. Admission to the museum free. For more information about the Bellarmine Museum of Art, visit http://www.fairfield.edu/museum or contact musem@fairfield.edu. A full schedule of events is available on the museum website.