Celtic Art in Europe

Making Connections

Christopher Gosden, Sally Crawford, Katharina Ulmschneider, Sally Crawford, Katharina Ulmschneider

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782976561
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The ancient Celtic world evokes debate, discussion, romanticism and mythicism. On the one hand it represents a specialist area of archaeological interest, on the other, it has a wide general appeal. The Celtic world is accessible through archaeology, history, linguistics and art history. Of these disciplines, art history offers the most direct message to a wider audience. This volume of 37 papers brings together a truly international group of pre-eminent specialists in the field of Celtic art and Celtic studies. It is a benchmark volume the like of which has not been seen since the publication of Paul Jacobsthal's Early Celtic Art in 1944. The papers chart the history of attempts to understand Celtic art and argue for novel approaches in discussions spanning the whole of Continental Europe and the British Isles. This new body of international scholarship will give the reader a sense of the richness of the material and current debates. Artefacts of rich form and decoration, which we might call art, provide a most sensitive set of indicators of key areas of past societies, their power, politics and transformations. With its broad geographical scope, this volume offers a timely opportunity to re-assess contacts, context, transmission and meaning in Celtic art for understanding the development of European cultures, identities and economies in pre- and proto-history. Nominated for Current Archaeology Book of the Year 2016.

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INTRODUCTION TO CELTIC ART IN EUROPE: MAKING CONNECTIONS

Chris Gosden, Sally Crawford and Katharina Ulmschneider

This volume attempts to provide a map of the interests and personal connections of Vincent and Ruth Megaw in their pursuit of an understanding of Celtic art. Since 1963 Vincent has been regularly visiting Europe, on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, to see and talk Celtic art. Initially enrolled as a PhD student in Edinburgh, although then based in Sydney, Vincent embarked on travels useful both to him and everyone he encountered. Meeting him for the first time in (probably) 1979 on the Dürrnberg, Austria where one of us (CG) was working for an Austrian team, it became immediately apparent that Vincent knew everyone, had a story to tell about each and their latest work and results. Indeed, Vincent’s work on Celtic art and his personal style combined around a central theme of connections. The Megaws’ work has been invaluable in demonstrating links between so many of the key pieces of Celtic art across the continent that it has helped create a comparative framework that we all take for granted. Built on earlier foundations, most obviously that of Paul Jacobsthal (1944), the evolving work of the Megaws has allowed us all to chart the growing corpus of material over the last 50 years. The line up of authors in this book is a testimony to the Megaws’ connections and people’s willingness to contribute is due to the high regard, personally and academically, in which they are held.

Much has changed over the last half century of work, but also many things have stayed the same. The corpus has grown and Europe has unified in a manner unimaginable in the 1960s. The Celts are still a preoccupation and this is linked to how far the art styles of the Early Iron Age derived from the Mediterranean. One way of reading the stress on the Celts was that they provided a means of insisting that the world of interior and western Europe had a set of styles and sensibilities separate and different to the Classical tradition. As is evident in this volume, the degree and nature of this separation is still being debated. Individual motifs came from the south, but it is likely that the logic of construction of decoration and its perception were foreign. The lack of naturalism has long been recognized and in their best papers (such as Megaw 1970) the Megaws have traced the construction and possible reception of styles. New sets of connections are now being canvassed, which see Celtic art as a western element of Eurasian systems of style and signification (Wells 2012) and much of the future may be spent charting such links and the differences from the naturalistic art of the world of empires and states to the south. New technologies in the form of modern databases and mapping tools will allow for more systematic and wide-ranging comparisons within Europe and beyond. The increasing number of finds excavated under modern conditions, such as at the Glauberg and Hochdorf, allow us to link objects to their archaeological contexts. This is allowing for discussion about the political and cultural strategies behind the making, use and deposition of spectacular objects (Garrow and Gosden 2012). We are also becoming more aware that the La Tène styles did have some roots in late Hallstatt forms, while differing from them in key aspects of their sensibility.

We feel that this volume is a fitting tribute to Vincent, as it is the first time in many years that such a wide geographical set of discussions on Celtic art have been brought together in one volume. It will give the reader a sense of the richness of the material and the main debates in which people are engaged. The papers chart the history of attempts to understand Celtic art and argue for novel approaches.

Some fundamental questions continue to bedevil 21st century studies of Celtic Art – the first is the definition of ‘Celtic’, the second the definition of ‘Art’. The question of whether these two words together have any meaningful relationship with the economy, society, identity and community of Europe outside the classical world hinges on the definition of ‘Celtic Art’. The Megaws have, through their scholarship, made a significant contribution to the continuing debates on these questions, and so it is fitting that the opening papers in this volume take up the baton of controversy. Both John Koch and John Collis point up, in their papers, that to understand the problems, it is necessary to understand the history of the discipline, to contextualize the original use of these contentious terms. Starting with the idea of ‘the Celts’, Koch re-investigates Herodotus’ famous references, and argues that there is a connection between Celtic ethnicity, language and art, that the geographical range covered by the term ‘Celtic’ should be widened, and that ‘La Tène’ art is only a small part of a much bigger ‘Celtic art’ picture. John Collis takes a closer look at the modern origins of the term ‘Celtic Art’, in particular the first published article on the subject by Victorian entomologist and artist John Obadiah Westwood. While the term seemed to fit the current state of knowledge in the mid-19th century, Collis argues that subsequent developments mean the term is no longer fit for purpose, if its purpose is to describe an art style confined to the Celts, or an art style used by all ‘Celtic’ people in antiquity.

If the term ‘Celtic’ is problematic, the term ‘art’ for the decorative material culture of the Iron Age is equally contentious. Part of the problem, as Felix Müller elaborates, is that modern ideas about ‘art’ are founded on criteria which explicitly exclude the proto-historic Celtic world. Is it possible to have ‘art’ without an ‘artist’? Like Koch and Collis, Müller looks back at the development of the history of the subject. The first serious study of European Celtic art was by Paul Jacobsthal, first known for his study of Greek vase painting, and whose early love of modern art was reflected in his publication on the modern artist, Ingres (1929). Jacobsthal’s work on European Celtic art, as Müller points out, was predicated on the assumption that, as with Greek vases, it would be possible to identify a ‘master’ responsible for particular outstanding pieces of work. The limitations of an ‘art historical’ approach, ultimately based on classical models, sell Early Celtic art short. These constraints, Müller argues, particularly the anachronistic search for an ‘artist’, should be set aside.

Laurent Olivier’s paper takes up the challenge posed by Müller in his closing paragraph by proposing a new way of interpreting Celtic art. Olivier argues that the modern eye is trained to view images in a particular, perspective-driven way, which is preventing us from seeing Celtic art with Celtic eyes. Borrowing a term from geometry – ‘rabatment’ – Olivier argues that Celtic artists were simultaneously communicating multiple viewpoints in their art, expressing the key characteristics of their object – lateral, horizontal and vertical views of a chariot, for example – rather than restricting themselves to the parts of the object visible from a static viewpoint. Olivier’s thesis demands a significant revision of current readings of Celtic art.

Vincent Megaw himself notably argued that Celtic imagery carries a range of meanings, in particular drawing attention to hidden faces within geometric patterns (Megaw 1970). In her paper, Jennifer Foster continues to build on her work of identifying these hidden faces, adding further persuasive zoomorphic images to the catalogue of elusive motifs. As Mitja Guštin’s review of three beautiful face masks in gold, silver and bronze indicates, the idea of the head inspired some of the finest pieces of Celtic art, even though the function and meaning of the objects may be obscure to archaeologists. Mariana Egri’s paper also focuses on faces, this time relating specifically to Danubian kantharoi. Egri correlates the imagery on these vessels to their archaeological contexts, arguing that, on kantharoi, the head carried a specific meaning relating to the ritual and personal use of the object – a significant step forward in decoding the ‘language’ of Celtic art. From the other side of Celtic Europe, Fernando Quesada Sanz considers the possibility of an Iberian ‘head cult’, but postulates that the decorative ‘severed heads’ found on a funerary dagger are as likely to represent trophy ‘kills’.

There is no consensus on the meaning of the severed head in Celtic art, and the chronological span and geographical ubiquity of heads as images throws up further problems, as Natalie Venclová and Jan Royt’s fascinating paper reveals. They review the possible Celtic origin of a stone head relief sculpture from the Czech Republic. The authors conclude, after careful assessment of the evidence, that the head is medieval – one fewer example for Vincent to catalogue in his forthcoming Early Celtic Art Supplement. But the Celtic origin of this head could only be ruled out after careful research, and the exercise serves to underline the intriguing possibility that the reverse may also be true: there may be many stone heads in collections across Europe currently mislabelled as ‘Medieval’ when they may in fact be Celtic.

Otto-Herman Frey and Fleming Kaul both turn their attention to iconic objects of the Celtic world, the Basse-Yutz flagons, well known through the Megaws’ detailed study of the burial (Megaw and Megaw 1990). At the time of their publication, the Megaws had little with which to compare the art on the Basse-Yutz flagons, but the recent discovery of the Glauberg flagon provides an impressive parallel, as Frey discusses. Kaul’s intention is to try to understand the symbolic meaning of the animal images on the flagon. Rather than seeing the flagon as a static work of art, Kaul thinks about the interaction between the object and the user, arguing that, as with Mariana Egri’s katharoi, the ‘artistic intent’ of the image is only fulfilled through action, in this case pouring the liquid from the mouth.

For Kaul, the Basse-Yutz flagon needs to be ‘read’ in the context of movement: for Paul Gleirscher, who analyzes a set of metal fragments from Leisach (Austria), the art on a carnyx is intimately connected to its use and to the sound it makes. For Gleirscher, the carnyx was both a weapon and a ritual object: its sound literally inspiring awe in the listeners. Celtic art has to be ‘experienced’, as well as viewed, for its meaning to be unlocked.

If there is a relationship between art, culture and social structure – religious or political – then the adoption or adaptation of new art styles should be a red flag indicator of social change. This idea is explored by Thomas Stöllner in his paper on the rich ‘princely’ graves of the Late Hallstatt and Early La Tène culture north of the Alps. Stöllner argues that the influence of Greek art in Celtic production is intimately tied to an adaptation of the older Greek idea of hero worship. For Stöllner, the emergence of a new style of princely burial marks a social and religious change characterized by an appropriation of images and ideals from the Greek world to empower and authenticate an emergent elite.

There are very close analogies for Stöllner’s thesis in the so-called ‘final phase’ burial ritual in Anglo-Saxon England. In the 5th and 6th centuries, grave goods in Anglo-Saxon burials signaled ethnicity and local group identity. But in the 7th century AD, Christianity was being introduced, and a new elite emerged who were keen to align themselves to powerful leaders on the continent and impose a new idea of kingship in their burials, rather than signal their local, ethnic identity. The change in social structure associated with the emergence of kingdoms found expression in a changing burial ritual. The new elite sought to validate their kingship, founded on an idea of imperium, by appropriating ideas of Romanitas in more or less accurate ways. The most well-known of these elite burials is that of the man buried at Mound 1, Sutton Hoo, whose grave goods were ostentatiously ‘Roman’ in character, including a unique burial costume imitative of images found on Roman sculpture and coins from previous centuries. The encompassing 7th century idea of Romanitas even included hanging bowls, typically with La Tène-style decoration, whose appearance in 7th century princely graves is best explained as part of an eclectic approach to expressing and recreating an Anglo-Saxon perception of the power of Rome in princely graves (Geake 2000, 17).

The material culture of early medieval England provides a number of close parallels with the Celtic world which might provide a fruitful area of comparison in terms of understanding the processes by which new influences are appropriated into art styles, the correlations between changing art styles and changing social structure, and the ways in which the language of art was read and interpreted in a pre- and proto-literate society. In this context, John Boardman’s contribution on the Alfred Jewel offers further fuel for comparison. Boardman argues for the selective and deliberate adoption and adaptation by the 9th century Anglo-Saxon court of iconography referencing part of the Alexander story, originating in the eastern Mediterranean. The image on the Alfred Jewel was a deliberate choice to convey a message which King Alfred knew his court and bishops, and possibly a wider audience, would be able to decode – it should hearten Celtic art scholars that its meaning still remains obscure to modern viewers, though Boardman offers a plausible explanation.

A similar process of selective inclusion of foreign material can be seen in the decoration of the 4th century BC Moscano di Fabriano brooch. As Venceslas Kruta argues, this brooch underlines the idea that external images were adopted and transmitted over time because they chimed with specific pre-existing Celtic concepts which gave the image meaning: for Kruta, it is necessary to distinguish between the content of an image, which relates to ideological systems, and the form of the image, which relates to chronological or geographical factors.

Other papers in this volume explore and test this contrast between ‘content’ and ‘form’ and their relationship to geography and chronology through studies of single objects, or micro-study of a particular type of object. Rudolf Echt argues that the decoration on a unique early La Tène reversible torc from Saarland helps to provide a chronological date for its manufacture and distribution, while Hrovje Potrebica and Marko Dizdar look at the geographical range of gold and silver beads in southeast Pannonia, finding that their distribution argues for links between the eastern Sava and the Požega Valley. Aurel Rustiou looks for parallels for the stamped pottery from a La Tène cemetery in Romania which demonstrate connections between the East and West in the 4th century: for Rustiou, as for Kruta, there is clear evidence in his study that Celtic art demonstrates local adaptation of symbolic language from external societies. But studies of stamped pottery decoration may lead to unexpected results, as Gertrúda Březinová shows in her examination of a single vessel with stamped decoration from Slovakia. The vessel has a stamped design which is relatively easy to parallel on other media, but is extremely unusual on pottery. What does the normative exclusion of this design on pottery signify, and what does its non-normative appearance on this exceptional pot indicate about the pot or the meaning of the stamp? The question remains open.

Distribution maps of objects or decorative elements may indicate the movement or ideas, or of people. For Tomasz Bochnak and Petar Popovič, documentary and archaeological evidence combine in their respective case studies to argue positively for movement of people. In his study of Balkan Kantharoi, Popovič argues that this chronologically persistent form of pottery vessel, adapted from Greece across the Balkans, allows an insight into contacts and migration, which are the best explanation for the widespread distribution of this form. Bochnak’s La Tène and Przeworsk strap shield bosses indicate, through different distribution of forms over time, that there were pre-migration contacts and exchange of ideas between the Przeworsk and Celtic cultures, followed by a westward migration of people from present-day Poland. Bochnak argues that there is an archaeologically-visible difference between people migrating away from a region, where the direction of movement may be erratic, widespread, and prolonged, compared to people making a deliberate decision to migrate to a chosen location, where the archaeological traces of movement will be deliberate and direct.

José Gomez de Soto moves the spotlight to the far west of the Celtic continental world in his study of a bronze ring found in the Charente-Maritime. The ring is problematic, in that the circumstances of its discovery mean there is scant evidence for the date or context of its original deposition, and its heavily-abraded state suggests that it was in circulation for many years after its original date of manufacture – perhaps curated through the Roman period. Gomez de Soto analyses the form and ornamentation of the ring and its closest parallels – of which there are none known so far from Gaul – to test whether it was of local manufacture or came to western France from long-distance trade: though it is plausibly of local manufacture, the decoration of the ring points up the need for more investigation of the ways in which western Gaul engaged with the rest of the Celtic world.

The question of local manufacture or import seems to have been solved to some extent for Celtic-type rings from Sanzeno, Italy, by the discovery of a stone mould, discussed by Franco Marzatico. Here, at least, there is evidence for the location of metalworking activity, usually elusive in a Celtic context. However, as Marzatico notes, while a stone mould is evidence for local manufacture, it leaves open the question as to whether the metalworkers themselves are local, foreign or itinerant smiths.

Paul Jacobsthal, whose work is referenced in many of the papers in this volume, was confident of the existence of itinerant master smiths in the Celtic world, but frustrated by his inability to prove this theory on the basis of the archaeological evidence to which he had access. Instead he wrote a tongue-in-cheek paper hypothesising their lives to explain the links he identified between decorative elements on Iron Age sword scabbards from Ireland and Britain and sword scabbards in Hungary. Some 70 years after he originally wrote his prescient paper for private circulation, it seems appropriate to publish it for the first time in this volume for Vincent Megaw, in many ways Jacobsthal’s direct scholarly descendent.

Jacobsthal’s putative smith worked for, and was commissioned by, warriors. Soldiers and mercenaries played an exceptionally influential role in commissioning, transmitting and transporting new styles in the early Celtic world, as Jan Bouzek demonstrates in his paper comparing changes in art in the archaeological evidence with written sources about the campaigns and subsequent migrations and settlements of early Celtic mercenaries. Looking in detail at the fragment of a dragon’s head terminal from Lower Austria, Maciej Karwowski also finds evidence of links between armour, Celts, the early Romans and the specialized steel from which this weaponry was made. Karwowski teases out Romano-Celtic links from a fragmentary ornament: Thierry Lejars takes equally unpromising material – corroded fragments of stamp-decorated iron sword sca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Celtic Art in Europe: making connections
• Chapter 2: Once again, Herodotus, the Κελτοί, the source of the Danube, and the Pillars of Hercules
• Chapter 3: The Sheffield origins of Celtic Art
• Chapter 4: Theorie der keltischen Kunst. Ein Versuch
• Chapter 5: Les codes de représentation visuelle dans l’art celtique ancien
• Chapter 6: Hidden faces and animal images on Late Iron Age and Early Roman horse harness decorated using the champlevé technique
• Chapter 7: The human masks of unknown provenience
• Chapter 8: Heads, masks and shifting identities: a note about some Danubian kantharoi with anthropomorphic decoration
• Chapter 9: Off with their heads…! once again: images of daggers and severed heads on an Iberian falcata sword
• Chapter 10: A Celtic severed head, or Lazarus in the arms of Abraham?
• Chapter 11: Zur Attachenzier der Schnabelkannen von Basse-Yutz
• Chapter 12: The not so ugly duckling – an essay on meaning
• Chapter 13: Fragments of a carnyx from Leisach (Austria)
• Chapter 14: Between ruling ideology and ancestor worship: the mos maiorum of the Early Celtic ‘Hero Graves’
• Chapter 15: Alfred and Alexander
• Chapter 16: La fibule de Moscano di Fabriano: un jalon important de l’évolution de l’art celtique au IVe siècle avant J.-C
• Chapter 17: Zum Wenden: der Halsring aus Gehweiler-Oberlöstern im Saarland
• Chapter 18: Late Hallstatt and Early La Tène gold and silver beads in southeast Pannonia
• Chapter 19: East meets West… The stamped pottery from the La Tène cemetery at Fântânele-Dealul Popii (Transylvania, Romania)
• Chapter 20: A vessel with stamped decoration from the Želiezovce collection
• Chapter 21: Balkan Kantharoi
• Chapter 22: La Tène and Przeworsk strap shield bosses from Poland
• Chapter 23: De l’anneau en bronze à têtes de béliers de Chermignac (Charente-Maritime) et de quelques pièces de harnais. La Tène finale de Gaule de l’Ouest
• Chapter 24: A mould for Celtic-type rings from Sanzeno in the Valle di Non, Trentino
• Chapter 25: ‘Leopold Bloom I’ and the Hungarian Sword Style
• Chapter 26: The Celtic mercenary reconsidered
• Chapter 27: The Dragon from Oberleiserberg
• Chapter 28: A l’aube du IIIe s. av. J.-C.: les fourreaux d’épée à décor estampé sur fer
• Chapter 29: ‘…to boldly go where no man has gone before.’ Dedicated to Ruth and Vincent…
• Chapter 30: Art and Craftsmanship in elite-warrior graves: ‘from Boii to Parisii and back again. ’
• Chapter 31: Ascot hats: an Iron Age leaf crown helmet from Fiskerton, Lincolnshire?
• Chapter 32: Snettisham swansong
• Chapter 33: The Iron Age open-air ritual site at Hallaton, Leicestershire: some wider implications
• Chapter 34: Brit-art: Celtic Art in Roman Britain and on its Frontiers
• Chapter 35: Art in context: the massive metalworking tradition of north-east Scotland
• Chapter 36: The Torrs Chamfrein or Head-piece: restoring ‘A very curious relic of antiquity’
• Chapter 37: Vincent, in appreciation
• Bibliography
• Colour Plates