Durrow’s lion: Irenaeus, Pictish stonescapes, and the Book of Durrow’s non-Hieronymian evangelical symbols

Abstract

The Book of Durrow’s curious switching of the Markan and Johannine evangelical symbols—contrary to Jerome’s Tetramorph—has long been dismissed as nothing more than a return to Irenaeus’s second-century hermeneutical formulation. In this essay, I argue against the notion that Irenaeus’s influence was the primary force behind this major artistic intervention. I propose instead that the Markan-Johannine iconographic switch was influenced by Pictish imagery, remediated from three-dimensional stonework into an Insular manuscript. Rejecting the analytical primacy of elite textual transmission, I utilize contemporary frameworks to recover a proposed ‘atmosphere of Pictish ambience’ that might have influenced the manuscript’s artistic program. With consideration of mobility between Iona and Pictland along the Great Glen, I thus situate the Book of Durrow firmly within its landscape context. By concluding with a focus on the Johannine lion, I ultimately demonstrate that the Durrow artist’s rendering of the evangelical symbols may be read in light of a shared Pictish and Columban visual vocabulary.