Celtic Art 1

Getting ready for my upcoming classes on the Celts, I have been scanning or downloading lots of images of beautiful or weird things, and over the next few weeks I will be sharing some of them here. Above, part of the Battersea Shield, which was dredged from the Thames River. The Celts had a habit of sacrificing objects to the gods by throwing them into the water, and many of the most famous masterpieces of Celtic art were found in this way. Below is a disk of unknown function from northern Italy, which art historians call a "phaleran" to hide their ignorance behind a wise-sounding Greek word.

Note that what most of us think of as Celtic Art, with all the elaborate interlacing, was not part of any pre-Roman Celtic style but a development of the early Middle Ages. I find it interesting that during the period when the northern peoples were being converted to Christianity and generally incorporated into the orbit of Mediterranean civilization, their art continued to develop along its own arcs, generally moving farther away from classical models rather than closer to it.