Ireland’s Painters, 1600-1940 By Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. 345 pp.h/b €55 (£40 stg) Ills 375 col, 50 b/w ISBN 0-300-09765-4 Toby Barnard The history of writing about painting in Ireland might appropriately be divided into the eras before and after 1978. The Painters of Ireland by Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin first appeared in that pivotal year. The book attested to, and in turn accelerated, a quickening interest in the art produced in Ireland. Indeed, stimulated by the publication, so much has since come to light, either canvases by Irish artists or documentation of their activities, that a new version is necessary. The resulting volume goes far beyond updating the original account. Apart from a subtle change in title, what else has altered? Sixty years have been added at the start of the book, which now opens in 1600, and twenty at the close, allowing a quick glance at ‘modernism’. Fifteen chapters have grown to eighteen. Moreover, with a new publisher comes a more generous format, elegant typography and additional illustrations. If the look is fresh, the approach remains unrepentantly traditional. It rests on chronology and biography; it judges the recorded painters and constructs a canon. Key works are regularly designated as ‘masterpieces’, even ‘great’ masterpieces, or placed confidently in the top rank. Theory does not detain the authors’ long. Reasonably enough they demur at the tendency of some to theorize about Irish art – as in other branches of history – before the rudiments are known. Their triumphant achievement is to narrate the principal developments over more than three centuries. On these deep and durable foundations, others – no doubt – will raise whimsical follies. In pushing back the starting point of their survey, the authors concede that nothing has come to light which modifies their original gloomy view of the underdeveloped state of the visual arts in early 17th-century Ireland. Wars, followed by the expropriation and exile of many inhabitants, made for an environment unfriendly to the commissioning and preservation of works of art. The few grandees – Ormondes, Kildares and O’Neills – who had themselves painted went abroad and to foreign practitioners. So we are treated by way of prologue to magnificent images by Holbein, of the ninth earl of Ormonde, and of the tenth earl by a Flemish artist. This set a pattern that would recur. The wealthy from Ireland–between the 17th and 19th centuries mainly protestant newcomers–paid Reynolds or Allan Ramsay in London or Batoni and Mengs in Rome to portray them. This told of an attitude, certainly not unique to Ireland, which disparaged what was on offer at home. One consequence was to drive the smart to fashionable foreign painters. It also obliged the talented in Ireland to make their careers elsewhere. A few, such as Thomas Frye, an innovator in mezzotints and in the manufacture of porcelain, prospered. So, too, did Francis Cotes, Thomas Hickey and James Barry. Yet, the prospect was not quite as bleak as might be imagined. If the frustrated but hopeful quit Ireland, their places were taken by immigrants bent on making livelihoods. So a succession of strangers, from Smitz, Gandy of Exeter, Croger, van der Hagen, Bellouchi, the Stoppelaers, Ricciardelli, Lewis, Gabrielli, William Ashford, and even Lavery descended on Ireland and, in several cases, thrived. Sadly, little of this output can now be identified. Indeed, as the authors remind, much that was in Irish houses was destroyed or looted during the upheavals of the 1640s and late 1680s, or was dispersed in more peaceful times owing to the financial embarrassments of the owners. As a result, there is a danger of underestimating the number of pictures in the larger towns, notably Dublin, and owned by merchants and professionals. Professor Crookshank and the Knight compare the situation in Stuart Ireland unfavourably with what can be recovered – and above all what survives – from Scotland and the American colonies during the same period. Yet, recent investigations of the paintings made in Wales and Pennsylvania hint at rather different conclusions. Ireland, potentially at least, contained a sizeable market, avid for pictures. Occasional references to paintings, hidden in account books, bills and inventories, are hard to match with surviving artefacts. Also, much of the visual imagery which enlivened otherwise bare interiors took either the prestigious and costly form of tapestries or the cheaper and increasingly popular device of engravings. Perhaps only when that last medium has been thoroughly investigated – an undertaking even more daunting than those completed so triumphantly by Crookshank and Fitzgerald – will the richness and variety of what filled even quite modest Irish homes be appreciated. Elsewhere they have written about portraits (in their first collaboration of 1969) and (more recently) of watercolours and works on paper. Understandably they are loath to repeat themselves. However, they do discuss decorative schemes which once graced houses like Kilsharvan, Mount Congreve, Whitfieldstown and Belleview and are to be found still at Lyons. By doing so they imply a distinction between undemanding furnishing pictures and the grander canvases replete with moral messages. However, they do not pursue this problem of the few who pontificated about the ethical benefits from paintings and the many who derived simple pleasure from beholding them. Connoisseurs with independent judgements were few; slaves to aesthetic fashions, many. The dealers who catered to this market receive a chapter to themselves: an innovation since 1978. It is one of many places in which Crookshank and Fitzgerald hint where further research may be rewarding and thus set an agenda, as they did in The Painters of Ireland, for the next quarter of a century. They also comment on the apparent absence of religious art associated with the Catholic Church and the tardy interest in animal painting. These observations connect with an important change in attitude which they have done much to engineer: the growth of art history as an academic discipline. As the numbers taking MAs and Ph.Ds expand, so the need to identify promising topics for worthwhile dissertations grows more tricky. Careful reading will yield many pointers to subjects meriting fresh investigation. Sifting through much dross, the authors rank their subjects. Few would dispute their ordering: Garret Morphy is awarded the palm for the later 17th-century; James Latham surpasses all in the first half of the 18th (Fig 5). Edmund Garvey is written off as ‘a somewhat dreary painter’. Late 17th century ladies, with their French hair styles and flashy clothes, make interesting canvases; early 19th century men do not. Thomas Roberts and James Forrester are felt not to have been recognized properly. Walter Osborne, Lavery and Orpen are acknowledged for their virtuosity and humanity. Only with Jack Yeats is there a note of dissent at the astronomical prices recently given for his work. At the same time, the authors are eager to promote obscure and little known figures, several of whom they themselves have rescued from the shadows. Where possible, as with Solomon Delane’s languorous Lake Albano, they back the case with telling illustration (Fig 3). Their eloquent advocacy will alert others to the value of the overlooked, encourage more information and canvases to be unearthed, and drive prices of these pictures upwards. Just as the 1978 volume was no mere register of what was then known, but an important spur to the redefinition of Irish tastes in paintings, this second volume can be expected to make a similar impact. Prosperity and pride were advancing in tandem in 1978 and Crookshank and Fitzgerald caught and strengthened those feelings. Their insistence on indigenous painters of merit chimed melodiously with impulses to collect and promote Irish art. In practice, as the introduction makes clear, the duo are sceptical about any distinctive Irish painterly school, seeing instead a ‘fragmented tradition’. The strength of their analysis is to probe the multiple influences to which painters in and of Ireland succumbed. Flanders, the Netherlands, Paris, Rome and Brittany all beguiled would-be painters. The well-travelled returned with their imaginations aroused and their techniques refined. Immigrants similarly introduced fresh approaches and perspectives. Indeed, it is notable that, with the exception of Grogan from Cork, the first to depict everyday scenes were visitors from England and Scotland like Francis Wheatley and Erskine Nichol. The tradition continued in the 20th century when artists as varied as John Piper, Edward Burra, Ben Hartley and Joan Hassall responded to Irish charms and quirks, and in the case of the last to the voracious bed bugs. Throughout the Georgian and Victorian periods, the avoidance of humbler or potentially controversial subjects suggested patrons who, if they sought anything other than portrayals of themselves and families, wanted to commemorate their houses, demesnes, horses, dogs and yachts. Again, though, problems of survival, and the use of humbler mediums of watercolour, pencil or ink, may have obscured more vigorous reportage of poverty than we presently know. Limited patronage and the timidity of many patrons are blamed for the feeble backing given to the talented. Before the late 18th-century, there was scarcely room for more than a single figure as the fashionable portraitist in smart Dublin: in turn, Pooley, Morphy, Slaughter, Hunter, Latham, Hussey, Stevens, Hone, Hugh Douglas Hamilton reigned. Nevertheless, there remained tasks for journeymen able to supply recognizable and cheap images, and for those who supplied the wants of provincials. Institutional patronage was feeble. After 1713, successive lords lieutenant notably failed to innovate in the arts. Although rare peers and pundits aspired to fill the gap, their resources were too limited and their interest too erratic to do so. The precocious Dublin School of Drawing trained talent, some of which was further refined by subsidized spells in London or Rome, but it found little work in Ireland. By the end of the 19th century, more looked at and bought paintings. The shift of patronage towards the urban and Catholics is something that might repay closer investigation. Artists, although corralled into professional bodies, quarrelled. Impresarios, notably Hugh Lane eager to stage exhibitions and endow public galleries, encountered obstruction not all of their own making. It may be churlish, given miserly funding, to suggest that some of these shortcomings persist. As in the past, so with the recent annexation of Francis Bacon as an Irish master, definitions of Irishness are stretched dangerously. Furthermore, spectacle–the artist as genius, eccentric, lunatic or loser–matter more than what she or he painted. Usually starved of funds, public collections depend, even more than private ones, on the flair or idiosyncracies of their curators and donors. Many, but not enough, examples discussed in Ireland’s Painters hang in public collections in Ireland (Fig 2). Before 1978, most of these Irish artists were undervalued if not unknown. It was a chance to assemble representative collections of Irish art. In some cases, shrewd and discerning purchases were made. But specialists with the perception and scholarship of a Crookshank or Fitzgerald were rarities, whether in the universities, where art history was in its sickly infancy, or among curators beset with more pressing political and financial problems. Now the most regarded of these painters, not just Yeats (Fig 1) but seemingly Hugh Douglas Hamilton and Tudor, have moved beyond the purses of the national galleries. Even so, there are works of considerable interest and attraction which have come on the market in recent years. Regrettably they have not been snapped up. Examples illustrated here include the series of accomplished miniatures by Henrietta Dering, one of the earliest documented female painters who later worked in north America; the capriccios of van der Hagen ripped from the walls of Irish houses; and the group portrait of the Belfast Adelphi Club, which deserves an appropriate home in the city whose associational life it celebrates (Fig 4). Unfortunately no institution in Ireland appears to be charged with the responsibility to form a historical conspectus of Irish painting in the manner of Tate Britain. Only the private collector, it seems, has the singleness of vision, the means and (maybe) the good advice to bring together the best of what enterprising auctioneers and dealers are now offering to slake the seemingly insatiable appetite for Irish works. This awareness and higher valuation of Irish paintings owe much to Professor Crookshank and Fitzgerald. Whether this casts them as successors of Berenson or Duveen, others will judge. Their collaboration, deceptively billed as the table-talk of two connoisseurs, results in an unfailingly clear and lively text. Their contentions gain much from the supporting illustrations. Here, as in their previous works, revelations and novelties abound. They have sniffed out the unfamiliar, frequently in private and overseas collections. As a picture book Ireland’s Painters bewitches, but it has much to feed the mind as well as the eyes. It does not altogether supersede The Painters of 1978, chiefly because its illustrations usefully supplement the earlier work. When the authors’ studies of portraits and watercolours are added the quartet is unsurpassed and is likely long to remain so in revealing, documenting and evaluating what has been painted in Ireland. Approximately sixty-five colour plates in the 1978 Painters now number 375 and almost every page surprises and delights. This book is a dazzing achievement which needs no brazen trumpet to amplify its authors’ fame. Dr Toby Barnard is a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.   Decorative Dublin By Peter Pearson The O’Brien Press 2002 160pp h/b e30 Ills 160 col ISBN 0-86278-784x Robert O’Byrne Peter Pearson has written several books about Dublin and now deserves to be considered one of the best-informed authors on the city’s architectural history. His latest work focuses less on buildings in the capital and more on the people responsible for their creation. However, as he acknowledges in his introductory essay, ‘Most of the makers of the objects and decorative details featured in the following pages are unknown to us, as very few records of any kind exist that might indicate their names, or where they lived and worked’. This lack of information has always hampered social historians, together with the almost-total absence of structures in Dublin pre-dating the 18th century. The city still retains the form given to it by our Georgian forbears, who were far more ruthless in obliterating the past than is any contemporary property developer. As a result, Pearson’s book has little to say about Dublin prior to 1700. And the amount of space he gives to the two hundred years after 1800 is also relatively brief. It soon becomes clear that his greatest admiration is reserved for the 18th century, and why not, since that was such a glorious period in Ireland’s cultural history. It was also a time when a large number of important craftsmen, albeit often immigrants to this country, worked in Dublin. The evidence of their skills remains widespread, whether the carvings of Simon Vierpyl on the exterior of City Hall or the stuccowork of the La Francini brothers in Clanwilliam House. These are the known masters, but how many other talented men who laboured beside them have now been forgotten? As Pearson notes, only the occasional piece of incidental evidence remains to recall these workers, such as the message discovered on the back of a stair bracket when an 18th-century house on Eccles Street was being dismantled ‘For the Lord Mayor’s (house), 2 dozen, signed Arthur Mooney’. The likelihood of our ever knowing more about Mr Mooney seems extremely unlikely. Georgian Dublin supported a great many craftsmen and artisans, as is evidenced by the thriving condition of guilds during that age. But following the Act of Union in 1800, an increasing amount of the materials used here in the construction and decoration of houses were imported from England where they had been produced in greater numbers and for less money than would have been the case in Ireland. The popularity of stained glass ordered from English catalogues for newly-constructed Roman Catholic churches during the 19th century is an example of this unfortunate trend, one for which nobody can be blamed but ourselves. The indigenous industry suffered and, despite Pearson’s belief that the 20th-century’s antipathy to ornamentation ought to be held at least partly responsible, the fact is that we allowed our own long-cherished skills to be lost forever. Indeed, there are really no traditional craftsmen now left in Dublin. The pleasures of this book are therefore often melancholy ones, as the author reports on yet another area of expertise in which sections of the populace formerly excelled. He covers not just the more obvious fields such as plaster and ironwork, but also more arcane subjects ranging from street paving to public clocks and weathervanes. In all these, however, he remains as disadvantaged as the rest of us owing to the limited amount of documentation which remains. The Great Exhibition held in Dublin in 1853 is an invaluable source of information on the Irish Victorian building trade, but such events were rare. Nevertheless, Pearson does provide nuggets of useful information, such as the fact that prior to the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840 houses did not have letter boxes; servants opened the door to receive any correspondence. And evidence of the importance of carpenters and joiners is indicated by an account for alterations carried out on 12 Henrietta Street in 1782 when their work accounted for more than half the total bill of 1,564 pounds. There are a couple of critical caveats to be made. Pearson is sometimes inclined to allow his enthusiasm for Dublin to overide reality, as when he proposes that the quality and quantity of the city’s decorative plasterwork ‘is unrivalled by any other European city’. And a short glossary of terms would be helpful; not all readers will know what is a Diocletian windows or a chamfer. But the book is very handsomely produced, full of fine colour photographs and, crucially, the accompanying captions contain plenty of helpful extra information. Robert O’Byrne is a former journalist with The Irish Times where he wrote primarily about fine art and design.   False Memory – Willie Doherty Caomhin MacGiolla Leith Merrill Publishers in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art. 2002 160pp h/b €35 ( Stg£25) Ills 80 col ISBN 1 85894179 2 Marianne O’Kane In its first year, the Irish Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective exhibition of the artist Mainie Jellet with an accompanying book authored by Bruce Arnold. This was the first in a series of retrospectives staged by IMMA ‘which would explore key figures in the development of art in 20th-century Ireland and elsewhere’ (IMMA, 1992). From Brenda Mc Parland’s foreword it is clear that Willie Doherty: False Memory is intended to continue this tradition and acknowledge the extensive contribution of Willie Doherty to national and international art. This is an important publication to mark Willie Doherty’s first major exhibition at the museum. From the outset, the artist’s work has focused on the culturally loaded context of his native Derry and the hegemony of debate in Northern Ireland. The eighties saw the near exclusive preoccupation of the artist with photo-text works that as Bakargiev acknowledges, are influenced by Kruger, Holzer and Birnbaum. These consisted of identifiable images, devoid of any human presence that carried emphatic words/statements. The nineties and the artist’s contemporary practise is dominated by installation, photography and video. The artist’s lens of the previous decade has become clouded with disillusionment at the stagnancy of the situation and the resulting image is offered ‘through a glass darkly.’ The title False Memory functions on a number of levels. It refers to the treachery of photographic images, media deception, the fallibility of the human gaze and subjective compositional arrangement. Both essayists in the text acknowledge the importance of these elements in Doherty’s practise. Each essay begins with an explanation of Bloody Sunday and interpretation of the work Willie Doherty created in response to this event. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is Chief Curator of the Castello do Rivoli in Turin. Her essay entitled ‘The Fallible Gaze’ is a thought provoking and valuable exploration of the artist’s development. It challenges the veracity of the photographic image and discusses the unreliability of individual testimony and the false memory syndrome connected with photography. The fallible gaze points to the artist’s awareness of the limitations of his work and his resistance to the label of social documentor. Doherty provides a subjective view of events and highlights the failure of photography to present reality. He focuses on, what Bakargiev refers to as, ‘the blind spot rather than the omniscient gaze’. She mentions the negative prefixes and terms of reference that the artist employs when titling individual works, such as ‘un,’ ‘dis,’ and ‘no.’ This method signals the subtext within the work, that element beneath the surface, which invites the viewer to think and look beyond the image presented. Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith is a curator, critic and lecturer in Modern Irish at University College, Dublin. His essay titled ‘Troubled Memories’, has a dual purpose. It highlights the difficulty of representing ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland, while acknowledging the deceptive nature of subjective memory. The artist’s work demonstrates that one can never achieve a collective absolute reality of anything. Mac Giolla Leith employs the cogent analogue of the holocaust to illustrate the impossibility of any individual’s ability to adequately articulate the extent of a shared tragedy of such magnitude. He writes; ‘This insistence on indeterminacy has been a hallmark of Doherty’s work from its very beginnings, as has his implicit advocacy of constant critical self-reflection in the matter of constructing and construing both images and narratives’. The essay focuses on Willie Doherty’s most politically charged works including, 30th January 1972, How it was, and I was there and I have doubts. Even within these three installation titles, we witness the artist’s development from an element of certainty – the date of Bloody Sunday, to individual subjectivity, to a state of indeterminacy. In Mac Giolla Leith’s words, Doherty has moved ‘from the specific to the generic.’ Roland Barthes discussed the herme-neutical possibilities of pictorial metaphor through an examination of static imagery. In many ways, Doherty offers a satirical critique of the unreliability of the media by utilising the instruments of mass media in his practise – photography, film, video, documentary evidence and individual statements. His early compositional arrangement of text and image closely echoed the tried and tested modas operandi of successful advertising campaigns, where slick photographs were complimented by a meaningful word or statement. Thus the artist captures the contemporary imagination while sardonically challenging both media and viewer through the hyper-accessibility of his artistic output. After a decade of this successful art campaign, Doherty removed the textual element of his work, to allow the image to communicate directly with the viewer unmediated by linguistic devices. In Dark Stains, a previous monographical publication of 1999, Maitre Lores quoted the artist’s reasoning for this development: ‘I had built a vocabulary that people already knew: when they saw one of my photographs, they already had the words in their head’ (Dark Stains). This proffers testimony to the fact, that, as in successful advertising, Doherty’s imagery had gained considerable iconic/symbolic status nationally and internationally. In Willie Doherty: False Memory, both essayists offer substantial contextual information to communicate with a wide international audience. The publishers promise that this text serves as a mid-career retrospective, and contains work from all stages of the artist’s career… [acting as] the most comprehensive book yet published on this challenging artist,’ and with this important retrospective monograph, they deliver. Willie Doherty: False Memory fulfils the difficult dual task of acting as a comprehensive introduction to the work of Willie Doherty for those who have not previously encountered it. It also extends the debate and provides insightful discussion of the artist’s career and development, which will prove rewarding for readers already familiar with the artist. Marianne O’Kane is Visual Arts Officer at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is also lecturer on Boston University’s Dublin Internship Programme and Curator of Cavanacor Gallery in Co Donegal   Dublin Part 1, to 1610, Irish Historic Towns Atlas No. 11, By H B Clark Royal Irish Academy 2002 36pp €30, ills 5pp coloured maps and plates 5 pp b/w maps and plates ISBN 1 874045-89-5 Dr Rachel Moss The eleventh fascicle of the Royal Irish Academy’s Irish Towns Atlas series marks a departure from the earlier publications, representing only the first of four volumes to deal with an individual town. As the earliest, and for nearly all of its history, the largest of Irish towns, the study of Dublin merits this approach, with this first installment examining the topographical development of the capital up to 1610. Howard Clarke’s clear and succinct text outlines the evolution of the town from its probable origins as two discrete pre-Viking settlements–Áth Cliath and Dubhlinn, to its form as it appears in the bird’s eye view of late medieval Dublin, provided by Speed’s map of 1610. The documentary record for Dublin is the most complete and continuous in the country and the massive redevelopment of the city over the past three decades has vastly increased our archaeological understanding of the city. These sources, generally accessible only to the more specialized reader, are expertly drawn together by Clarke who manages to provide a wealth of information within the limited space of his text, topographical index and accompanying maps, views and photographs. The picture that emerges brings the medieval city to life, and highlights features of the city’s topography that have their origins in the period. Thus Clarke suggests that a short length of an un-named road from Tara towards the main fording point in the Liffey may be preserved in the old Dublin street name ‘Stoneybatter’ and highlights that east-west alignment of Castle St and curving north-south alignment of Fishamble street may well echo the street pattern of 10th century Dublin. With so little architecture surviving from the period, a mixture of archaeological and textual evidence is drawn upon provide some image of the Dún at Dublin, described in the 12th century as one of the ‘seven wonders of the Ireland’. The index of topographical information provides a significant reference point for any historian of Dublin, including information on municipal boundaries, administrative divisions, population and housing. Particularly interesting is the listing of over 1,300 streets and specific buildings, accompanied by map references, and a comprehensive summary of historical references and archaeological information. The town charter of 1192, 15th century metes and bounds of the city and an important description of the circuit of the city walls written in 1585 are reproduced in full in the appendices. Fifteen maps, photographs and views all reproduced to a high standard which provide an invaluable accompaniment to Clarke’s text. Part 1 of the Dublin Historic Town’s atlas provides an important contribution to the urban history of Ireland and is an essential tool to anyone interested in the development of the city. We look forward with anticipation to the next volume. Dr Rachel Moss is a freelance architectural historian.   Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland. Irish Antiquities By Patrick F Wallace & Raghnall Ó Floinn, editors Gill and Macmillan in association with The Boyne Valley Honey Company 2002. 315pp. h/b. €39.95, col ills 236 ISBN 0 7171 2829 6 Roger Stalley Art and national identity are deeply entwined, and this was certainly the case in the 19th century, when the discovery of treasures like the Tara brooch and Ardagh chalice reinforced nationalist notions of a great Irish civilisation, brutally expunged by the Normans. The treasures are now a familiar part of Ireland’s history, and it is easy to forget the excitement engendered when some of them were first unearthed (literally unearthed, from a field of potatoes, in the case of the Ardagh chalice). During the 1970s and 1980s a series of exhibitions brought the outstanding quality of early Irish art to an international audience, and magnificent catalogues were published to accompany those exhibitions. But almost twenty years have now elapsed, and the National Museum felt the need for a new survey of its ‘treasures’, one that would cater for the interests of the general visitor rather than the specialist. The result is a handsome volume, packed with colour illustrations, that takes us swiftly from the Mesolithic to the medieval. In some ways the book is like an exhibition catalogue, with groups of photographs devoted to each period, the latter preceded by lengthy captions and introductory essays. The first essay outlines the history of the collections before they arrived in the present building in Kildare street, and a wonderful set of historic photographs shows some of the more famous items in an earlier location, on display in the Royal Irish Academy. There are also intriguing photographs of the great court of the museum, splendidly bedecked for the opening celebrations in 1890. The selection of items for inclusion in the book was left to individual curators and they include some interesting choices: a stunning spearhead from Boho (Fermanagh), a marvellous gold finger ring from around 1200, and the recently acquired book shrine known as the Miosach. There is an amazing detail of the Ardagh chalice showing the engraved letters on the surface, and some superb images of gold neck rings and dress fasteners from the late Bronze Age. To a large degree the book will depend on its photographs: while many are magnificent, a fair number were reproduced at a frustratingly small scale; it is also a pity that a light rather than a dark background was often chosen. The essays consist of straightforward summaries of the various archaeological periods, an arrangement that allows little scope for tackling some of the more basic questions which I suspect visitors are prone to ask: not least how were the objects constructed, and how could filigree as microscopic as that on the Derrynaflan paten be made without the aid of a magnifying glass; and how were the many items of personal ornament–the gold dress fasteners of the late Bronze age or the penannular brooches of the Christian era–actually worn? But the reader will be left in no doubt about the extraordinary quality of the museum’s collections, where the major items, far from being mere examples of ‘material culture’, are consummate works of art. n Roger Stalley is Professor of the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin.