The Voyage of Brendan / Navigatio Sancti Brendani
Saint Brendan of Clonfert was an Irish monk of the Early Middle Ages. Considered one of the “Twelve Apostles of Ireland,” he is best known in Brittany for founding a monastery in Aleth, near the present-day city of Saint-Malo, and for being the origin of many Breton place names.
During the Middle Ages, his fame spread throughout the Western world, thanks to the account of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, which describes the saint’s legendary journey to the Isle of the Blessed, a kind of Celtic odyssey to Paradise.
To create these illustrations, David Balade drew particular inspiration from an adaptation of the legendary tale by René-Yves Creston: some twenty works were thus created using mixed media on paper, in the spirit of the finest graphic creations of medieval Irish art.