The Celtic World (Routledge Worlds)

(Barry) #1

  • The Social Implications of Celtic Art -


et al. 1991: 158) hint at a local background for the genesis of this Waldalgesheim
manner - the case for southerly development is not good, for the Filottrano gold
neck-ring Qacobsthal 1944) shows a total misunderstanding of the prototype axillar
flowers Qope 1971: 175; d. Moscati et al. 1991: 286). Heightening of interest away from
the Hellenic is well shown by the Celtic flagons of the fifth century Be imparting a
subtle, gracious incurving to the straighter body-line of the Etruscan examples
Qacobsthal 1944:, pI. 178-88, 196; Megaw and Megaw 1990 : 37-9,41,45).
Animalizing or floralizing of finials (Moscati et al. 199 I), in structure or
ornament, or using animals or birds as a living part of a construction, was another
way of heightening interest widely used by Celtic people. This continued on into the
Christian world, as seen for instance in the inhabited scroll (Toynbee and Ward
Perkins 1950). The intensive expressive exploitation of asymmetry is another further
illustration of this quest for heightened interest, giving in Britain of the second-first
century Be a vitalizing of ornament so that the eye cannot resist the dynamism, as in
the springing yo-yo effect on the Battersea shield Qope 1978 : 33).
We know a little of the instruments Celtic artists used for working metal and
other materials, and there are hints that designs were sometimes transmitted through
'pattern-books' (Raftery 1983, 1984).
A steadily growing interest in colour was yet another way in which Celtic people
heightened the interest of their visual scene. First natural-coloured materials, above
all the precious foreign pink-red coral, from the fifth century Be (Champion 1976),
were used, and hard on their heels incessant experiment in producing artificial
colours with vitreous materials. Most widely used, from the fifth century onwards,
was 'red enamel', a lead glass given its red opacity with cuprous oxide. This could
indeed have been a Celtic invention, for it seems first encountered in European Celtic
work of the fifth century Be (Megaw and Megaw 1990: 40-1, 43). Celtic workers
somewhat later seem to have been responsible for using this red opaque vitreous
material more readily as a true enamel, taking advantage of its coefficient of expan-
sion properties between bronze and glasses to effect an efficient graded junction
between glass and bronze even on pre-Romano-British pieces, such as the Westhall
terrets Qope 1953), a good example of Celtic expertise in applied science.
Yellow glasses p'articularly have been instrumental in showing up the locations of
workshop or craft-tradition spheres of influence, as also have red opaque glasses
(Henderson 1989; Jope and Jacobsthal in press: maps 9 and 10). Cobalt was used to
produce blue glasses in iron age Europe (Henderson 1989: 34-6), but in a way the
blues produced from copper can be of more interest here. The pigment 'Egyptian
Blue' (arguably man's earliest artificial material) is a copper-calcium silicate forming
a deep blue only when cooled from between 550° and 600°C; when ground up it
gives a pale blue powder used in Roman wall-paintings - it was being made as
raw material even in Roman Britain Qope and Huse 1940a, b) by native British
artworkers (who clearly had some hand in the development of wall-painting in
Roman Britain (Henig 1985; 14ff.; Toynbee 1964: 213-31». This blue pigment was
being made at Woodeaton near Oxford in the third-fourth century AD and used in
the wall-paintings in buildings around the Romano-British temple (successor to a
Celtic temple), and the walls of several other villas, as far as 30 miles north Qope and
Huse 1940b). Britons of this time evidently knew of this early piece of experimental


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