SOURCE: "Pictish Art and the Book of Kells" in Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe: Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, edited by Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick, David Dumville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 79-105.

In the following essay, Henderson examines the many similarities in composition and decoration between Pictish monuments and the art of the Book of Kells.

The relevance of the great Gospel Books of the seventh and eighth centuries illuminated in the Celto-Saxon style to the understanding of Pictish sculpture has always been recognized.¹ The national type of monument, the cross-slab, has often been described as a folio in stone, and the founder of Pictish art-historical studies, J. Romilly Allen, claimed that the Nigg cross-slab 'approaches more nearly to the ornamental pages of the Irish books of the Gospels' than any other sculpture in the British Isles.² That there was some relationship between the Insular books...