- The Social Implications of Celtic Art -
1971: 16, 15; Jacobsthal 1944: pIs. 70, 101, III) it is difficult not to see artist and
patron relaxing in mutual enjoyment over the result.
The craft thus took its place in developing design for use at all social levels, and
had thus a socially moulding role. We now devote a few pages to exploring this theme
at practical levels.
TECHNIQUE, DESIGN AND ARTISTRY 600 BC-AD 600:
THE CRAFT CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIAL LIFEThese three were closely interlinked in the output of Celtic craftsmen and artworkers,
who were making luxury goods as well as utility equipment. Manipulation of
materials sometimes preferentially promotes particular shapes, which may then get
fossilized in a different material. Some horse-bits of the first century Be, and later,
illustrate this: the sidelinks were made first in wrought iron, bent over and welded,
leaving a small projection; such bit designs were then made in cast bronze (from a
wax model and clay mould); play with the junction (now a solid bronze casting)
has yielded a variety of bird-bills Gope 1950; Scott 1991: 3-4), which must have led an
Irish craftsman to try a few rare essays in anthropic faces (Raftery 1983). Something
similar, though involving only bronze, must have led, in the early fifth century Celtic
heartlands, to the attractive bird-head brooch designs Gacobsthal 1944: pI. 153-9).
This influence of technique on design is illustrated even more instructively in the
developing design of the chapes made to protect the tips of dagger sheaths and sword
scabbards during the sixth to third centuries Be. Here we can see how experiment
with loose-part constructions of iron and bronze (composite chapes), as guy-wires
or twisted strips, gradually consolidated the structure into one-piece units of cast
bronze (Figure 21.10), to give the basic design for one particular type of early
La Tene chape, one which pervaded most of the Celtic world during the fifth-third
centuries Be. Figure 2 I. I I shows how this experimental phase began among the
armourers of the headwater lands of the rivers Aisne and Marne in the fifth century
Be Gope 1974). The map further shows how this design, consolidated as a one-piece
construction, spread during some two centuries through much of the then Celtic
world, to Hungary in the east, and Ireland in the west Gope and Jacobsthal, in
press, 5 I). Rarely do we have the birth and evolution of a cultural type set out before
us so fully and with such clarity.
In a lesser way, armourers of middle Europe in the third century Be devised an
ingenious sword suspension-chain system, allowing the body to twist freely in fight-
ing, and they exploited the technical processes of hammering the links and texturing
them with punchwork (Moscati et al. 1991: 325, 364; Szabo 1971: pI. 43) but this
pleasing result had no future because just at that time such sword-suspension became
irrelevant in fighting (Rapin, in Moscati et al. 1991: 323-6).
Early Celtic craftsmen were remarkably skilful in manipulating very thin sheet (or
strip) iron G ope 196 I). They made innumerable sword blades of varied quality, the
best (about half of them) with cutting edges of carbon steel, sometimes welded on to
a softer blade (an operation needing the very highest skill), the finest of all being
pattern-welded even in the fourth century Be (Pleiner 1993: 117-18, 167, 183-4).