Conclusion: Art and Architecture

It is to be expected that many scholars would look to England when studying the visual arts in later medieval Irish since study after study, whether of church architecture, castles, funerary monuments, floor tiles, jewellery or church plate, indicates that it is from there that the strongest impulses came. Consciously or unconsciously, however, this has led to direct comparisons being made between the two. Such comparisons obscure a number of fundamental differences. The first is one of scale. Ireland never had the resources or population density, apart perhaps for a brief period in the first century or so of the Anglo-Norman colony, to undertake building projects on a large scale. The failure of the English crown to establish control over much of the newly colonized lands meant that royal patronage (with the exception of some royal castles) was almost non-existent and therefore no ‘court style’ could evolve. Dublin, the seat of royal government, never became a metropolis such as London or Paris, capable of developing its own specialist workshops to rival those of imported goods or expertise. The second difference is one of culture. Only a very small part of the country within the Anglo-Norman colony could be regarded as reflecting English cultural values and aspirations, and only then for a short period in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The adaptation of English fashions to Irish taste, social organization and patterns of patronage is what made late medieval Irish art and architecture distinctive. Some of the key questions of the transmission of English styles of art and architecture continue to be those posed by Stalley in an important analysis of Irish Gothic and its relation with contemporary English architecture:

Were the patrons who financed the building Gaelic or Anglo-Irish? What conception would they have had of current notions of taste? Which churches in the vicinity set the fashion? How influential was the architecture of Dublin? How widely did masons travel? Where were they recruited and, more significantly, where were they trained?69