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The Book of Kells is protected in Trinity College, Dublin as a state-treasure.

Annually over 250,000 people come to Trinity College to admire the thousand year old handwriting of the Book of Kells.

However, the greatest cultural treasure of the Irish currently has only two pages on view. The Book of Kells is so sensitive to light, touch and temperature that is only possible to display pages for a few days at a time to avoid damage.

t is an angel. Out of his shoulders blue wings sprout. Opposite an eagle perches. It holds a book in it claws. Now it becomes something else, the eyes alive. Under the bow a lion and a calf, symbols of the evangelists Mark and Luke, dance a bashful Pas de deux in gold, blue and red.

Zoomorphic figures, animals and people, pictured in semicircles embellished as a dance. In one of them two naked men hover, weightless, stationary - now two Siamese cats. Onto the wine-red page two blue, Atlantic seals leap up. You must get air.

A thousand years after the paint was applied to the calf-skin-parchment, the "Book of Kells" still glows as freshly as it did on the day of its creation. We don't know, how many monks in Ireland died, because they used the paint used in the "Book of Kells". One of the pigments used is well known under the name arsenic-yellow. Since the dye is extremely poisonous, extremely careful handling is necessary. A slip with the marten-hair-brush and immediately the scriptorium had a job available.

The artists were the Paul Klee of the scriptorium, neat, precise, harmonious; the ink of the handwriting has created a similar homogeneous whole. The exquisite calligraphy, the capital letters, that structure of the hand-writing, the"Book of Kells" ranks as one of the masterpieces of all time. One of the artists was responsible for the blue's and the green's. Towards the end of the book there are two pages, that are his entirely. One the letters has been decorated solely with blue. On the opposite page applies the corresponding green. The pages are as perfect as snow-crystals.

To get a comparison of the depth of the art one must go back to pre-Christian India or pre-Columbian America or to leap to the art of the last hundred years. It is not until Gauguin, Picasso and Dali dared it again, that such bold tones and such impertinent sensuality have been applied to art.

write with pleasure, about the artwork, which I dream of, for example "ll matrimo-nio della Vergine" by Raffael. It hangs in the Brera Museum, in Milan, where I live, and I could go every day, just to look at it. However, if I saw it that frequently then maybe I would not dream about it.

Another of my dreams is the "Book of Kells" held in the Trinity College in Dublin, displayed under glass. As far as I can remember, every day a different page is displayed. And there are many pages in this book. So it comes about, that one of the artworks that fascinate me the most me, up until now I only have a partial knowledge. I had already believed that my life must finish without having seen the entire work, but now I find, that a Luzern publisher has prepared a facsimile edition, as perfect as only a facsimile could be. The publisher has said to me that in approximately in one year, I could leaf through the entire"Book of Kells".

What had fascinated Joyce and I about the "Book of Kells", has now become clear. We found in this work the shattering examples of medieval Irish art, that impresses even today with their unrestrained imagination, with the labyrinthine sense for the abstract, with their paradoxical invention. In the "Book of Kells" one finds themselves caught up in this whole methodical craziness that we encounter at Scoto Eriugena, in the paradoxical World of Swift, in the metaphysical Solipsismus of Berkeley, in the contradictory determination of Wilde and Shaw and so many other Irish authors.

The "Book of Kells" is an open work. In some of my other works and in my narrative I have used the illustration of the maze, so I am especially thankful to the "Book of Kells". I have also discovered, that besides Joyce even Borges knew it. This work is not only testimony to a great past, but also a topical book, that even for our own century has had a great influence.

e look today at the facsimile, which shows that for a thousand years we may have been backing the wrong cultural horse. Supporters of the macho aesthetics of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and of the Pax Romana ideology - which starts with the Ceasars and finishes with the tomes of the stalwart Latin Professors, that maintained the Imperialist designs, has made us blind to the infinitely more tenuous and more humorous art forms of the Celts.

he colour pigments used were some of the most sought after in the world. The radiant ultramarine, that is used in abundance, was a mixture of ground lapis lasuli, egg white and Arabian rubber: from the Hindu-Kusch mountains it arrived via Persia and Constantinople to Europe. Carmine pigment came from Southern France, where it was extracted from the bodies of the female Cochineal shield-louse. The burning purple came from Spain, as well as the sun-coloured pigments, a saturated yellow with a powerful illumination, which even surpassed gold leaf and was similarly expensive was also used. A thousand years, after it was applied to the pages of the "Book of Kells", it still glows as if it dried yesterday. If one views the illustration of Luke with a magnifying glass, one realises how all the different illustrations, have been decorated with an unimaginable amount of detail. The head being hardly a centimetre wide, has absolutely perfect eyebrows and tiny pupils in the eyes. On the opposite page standing eagles, whose heads measure no more than six millimetres across, have details that is distinct from bird to bird. An Irish legend attests that the "Book of Kells" is the work of angels. Actually it comes from a group young artists, that were at the pinnacle of their creative power. They must have been young, because painters of the day as old as forty, were unable to create such fine labarynthine patterns, because lenses were still unknown. Two of the painters were especially masters of their subject. The variations in their style and their temperament, the collaboration of such radically different talents created the "Book of Kells" we know today. One of them was probably an Irishman, or possibly a Scotsman: He mastered the millennium-old artistic technologies of the Celts, especially the of the metal designs. Neat, precise, sober - he was the Kandinsky of the Scriptoriums. Towards end of the book one discovers two of his designed pages, one in blue, the other in green. They are as perfect as two snow-crystals. Alone in many ways, he is responsible for the making of the masterpiece called the "Book of Kells". His greatest rival in the writing-room - one can even see the competition in the manuscript, a competition of virtuosos, was a spirited, nervous Southerner. Maybe an Italian, or possible an Armenian or Arab. In each instance one can see, that the art of the ancient Mediterranean world dominated, the art of Greece and Rome, Persia and Byzantium. His style is vigorous and goes into the fantastic, his colours are those of the south - fig purples, sunflower yellows, a black, as impenetrable as the night-heaven over Tangier: He was the Salvador Dali of the artist-group.

aksimile Verlag Luzern after an expenditure of time, money and work-hours, have excelled in reproducing the volume produced by the four scribe-monks 1100 years ago in Ireland.

ne of the most striking testimonials of this epoch is today in the Trinity College in Dublin, the "Book of Kells". Thousands of pilgrims annually pay a visit. In the "Long Room" of the College, a long round-vaulted library, it is stored in its own cabinet. It includes on its 680 pages the four gospels of the New Testament, therefore, for the audience of this great treasure viewing it in the subdued light, the room takes on a silent aura.

The reverence of this work is justifiable. The Folio has the venerable age of 1200 years. It originated in about 800, therefore at the time of Charles of the Great time in a Scriptorium of an Irish or Scottish cloister. The scholars argue over where it was really created. It may have come from an area fifty kilometres north-west of Dublin at a place named Kells (where the name of the volume comes from, since it was stored for a long period of time in a cloister there, before it was given to Trinity College at the time of the Reformation), or on the Hebrides Ireland, one of the most important centres of the Irish-Scottish Monasteries. Maybe both theories are correct, as the richly pictorial Evangelical Book was written and painted when the golden age of the Irish-Scottish culture was nearing its end. The Norman's and Danes came in their flat boats over the sea, and burned and destroyed the coastal cloisters. The monks fled and took as much as possible of their completed work with them. Incalculable treasures were lost throughout the invasion of the North-lands, and countless people were killed in a most cruel manner. It was, as if fate itself, wanted to avenge the Irish Celts for their progress and centuries of peace.

t was not sure from the exemplary pages how the riddles should be deciphered, from the Greek initial writings of the Christians XPI Matthew 1, 18- [Christi autem generatio sic erat] ("The birth of Christ happened thus."). to show in an illustration corner the comical scene, of two mice dragging the tails of two cats across a cross-carved wafer. The Swiss art-scientist Antonio von Euw, Director of the Schnütgen-Museurns in Cologne, explains a second meaning behind the joke from the cloister-working: The unknown painter at the threshold of the 9th century has alluded to the suffering of the young monks under their elder contemporaries and highlights also at possible Communion disputes.

And the secret of the Facsimile? It lies, along with all other careful handling, in a specially developed "book-holder" with a complex vacuum system, that it allows the pages to be held gently at non painted positions at the rear to allow the front to be photographed.

n the "Book of Kells" the precious colours glow in the same way they did on the day they were painted, twelve-hundred years ago: the red out of red lead and from the Southern European shield-louse, the yellow for a gold-substitute. Purple, lilac and maroon from the Crozophora tinctoria, a Mediterranean plant, white from white lead, bright-green from verdigris and blue out of Lapis lazuli, the gold-stone of the Middle Ages, these were all obtained on the free market from merchants as far away as the Himalayas to the isles of the Saints and scholars.

It was decorated in a manner similar to that of goldsmiths, filigree by filigree. Normanne Giraldus Cambrensis in his 1187 "Topographia Hiberniae" wrote: "you would think this is the work of an angel and not a person".

It is no miracle then, that the Trinity College do all in their power, to preserve the angels work over the years: In this century the "Book of Kells", was threatened by that earthly fate, decomposition, a large-scale effort was needed to remove the dust accumulated from the green isle. It was almost a miracle therefore, that the Swiss facsimile publisher got permission, to provide a duplicate of this masterpiece of early book illumination. In ten years of negotiations, examinations and detailed plans, to the development of a specially designed document holders and cameras, to the hundred and fifty flights between Zurich and Dublin, to the final colour matching and the consumption of twenty tons of specially made paper, we now have a full replica available.

here is debate about where the book originated, but certainly the authors were Irish monks, and on the hides of 190 calves wrote not only the four gospels, but added an incredible profusion of fantastic ornamentation and figures illustrated, with often jovial scenes from wildlife. Only two the 680 pages of the "Book of Kells" is without pictures.

How was it possible that around the year 800 they held a herd of 1300 cows, the required number to produce the 190 new-born calves that the hides came from, and similarly puzzling is what route was taken to obtain the pigments that the monks used for their colours Lapis lazuli for example, a half-gem from Afghanistan, from which the luminous blue was produced.

Although the book will remain in a glass case and nobody can browse, we will have soon, the facility to provide the opportunity for more people than ever before, to admire each illustration, each initial, each letter and study the meaning of each line through commentary by such experts as Peter Fox, Anton von Euw (Conservator at the Schnütgen-Museum in Cologne) or Professor J.J.G. Alexander (Iinstitute of Fine Arts in New York).

Of course the producer is Swiss: The publisher is Urs Düggelin from Lucerne. With the Facsimile Volume of the "Book of Kells" he has added to his previous successes with Swiss Manuscripts and the Books of Hours of the Duc de Berry, "a life long goal has been achieved".

First, the development of a complex photo-technology made it possible: the touch-free photographic folio holder and camera. Alone, this new technology took Faksimile Verlag Luzern 2 1/ 2 years of design and implementation work.