“Celtic” is a Greek word, not the name of a nation
Around 500 BCE the Greek geographer Hecataeus of Miletus mentioned a people called the Keltoi, and a few decades later Herodotus placed them near the source of the Danube. That is where the word comes from. The people themselves left no writing about who they were, and there was never a single Celtic state: the name covers dozens of tribes, from Ireland and Spain to the Danube, who spoke related languages and shared some habits of dress, burial and decoration.
For this reason many archaeologists today prefer to talk about Iron Age art rather than “the Celts”. What links the objects is a way of decorating, which spread over a wide area and lasted for centuries. It can be followed in two phases, named after two sites: Hallstatt, in Austria, and La Tène, in Switzerland. The wider picture of what came before is in the guide to prehistoric art, and where the Iron Age fits among the other periods is in the beginner’s map of art history.
Hallstatt: salt, iron and Greek bronze in a princess’s grave
The first phase (about 800-450 BCE) takes its name from a cemetery above the salt mines of Hallstatt, in the Austrian Alps, where more than a thousand graves were excavated in the nineteenth century. Salt and iron made some families very rich. Their art is mostly geometric: lines, zigzags, concentric circles and small water birds on bronze vessels, belts and brooches.
The richest Hallstatt graves show how far their contacts went. At Vix, in Burgundy, a woman was buried around 500 BCE with a bronze krater (a vessel for mixing wine with water, one of the main Greek vase shapes) made by Greek craftsmen around 510 BCE. It stands 1.64 metres high, taller than many of the people who saw it, and it is one of the largest bronze vessels to survive from antiquity. Greek wine and the gear for drinking it were status symbols north of the Alps, and that taste for Mediterranean things would shape the next style.
La Tène: when the curves took over
Around 450 BCE a new style appeared in the Rhineland and eastern France. It is named after La Tène, a site on the shore of Lake Neuchâtel where, from 1857, hundreds of iron swords, spears and brooches were found in the shallow water. La Tène artists took the palmettes and lotus flowers of Greek and Etruscan imports and pulled them apart: stems became tendrils, leaves became S-curves, and faces or animal heads appeared inside the plants and then vanished again.
The two flagons from Basse-Yutz, in Lorraine, made between about 420 and 360 BCE, show the mix well. Their shape copies Etruscan wine jugs, but the handles are animals and the surface is inlaid with coral and enamel. On the spout sits a small duck, swimming towards the wine as it pours.
Over the following centuries the style changed. Historians divide it into sub-styles, a system set out by Paul Jacobsthal in Early Celtic Art (1944): an early phase close to its Mediterranean models, a looser, more flowing phase, a “plastic” phase where the decoration swells out of the metal, and a “sword style” engraved on scabbards. You don’t need the names to see the trend: the further from the Mediterranean and the later in time, the more abstract the designs became.
Gold, bronze and enamel: the objects that matter
The neck ring called a torc is the most typical Celtic object, worn by men and women and shown on statues of gods. The finest is the Great Torc from Snettisham, in Norfolk, found by a farmer ploughing his field in 1950. Made between about 150 and 50 BCE, it is built from eight strands of gold alloy wire, each twisted from eight thinner wires, with hollow terminals decorated in relief. Why it was buried, with other torcs, is not known: an offering or a hidden treasure are both possible.
Bronze was for display as much as for war. The Battersea Shield, dragged from the Thames in London and dated between 350 and 50 BCE, is probably too thin to have been carried in battle: it was most likely made for show, or as an offering to the river, where many fine weapons were thrown. Its three roundels are set with red glass. In Britain, bronze mirrors were engraved on the back with patterns of curves and hatched fields that read like a puzzle of positive and negative space.
Few people, many faces: what the symbols meant
Celtic art rarely tells stories. There are few scenes with people and almost no portraits; instead you find faces, masks, boars, horses, birds and the three-legged swirl called a triskele. What they meant is mostly lost. The Celts wrote little of their own, and what we know of their beliefs comes from Greek and Roman authors, such as Julius Caesar, who were often describing an enemy.
The great exception is the cauldron found in 1891 in a peat bog at Gundestrup, in Denmark. Its silver plates show gods, a horned figure sitting cross-legged with a torc in his hand, warriors with long trumpets and animals from far away, such as elephants. It was probably made in the first century BCE, and many scholars think the silversmiths worked in the Balkans, in the Thracian tradition, so the cauldron may have travelled a long way before it was taken apart and laid in the bog.
The “Celtic knot” belongs to the Middle Ages
The interlaced knots printed on souvenirs and tattoos are called Celtic, but they are not Iron Age. They come from the Insular art of the monasteries of Ireland and Britain, between the seventh and ninth centuries CE, part of the wider world of early medieval art. The great examples are gospel books: the Lindisfarne Gospels (about 700) and the Book of Kells (about 800), which may have been begun on the island of Iona, off the Scottish coast.
Insular artists did borrow the old spirals and trumpet curves, which had survived in Ireland, but they combined them with interlace from the Mediterranean and with the animal patterns of the Germanic peoples, the tradition that would later produce Viking art. In the nineteenth century the Celtic Revival merged all these into one “Celtic” look, and that is the one most people know.
What ended it, and where it survived
On the continent, the Roman conquest closed the story. Julius Caesar took Gaul between 58 and 50 BCE, and Britain was invaded in 43 CE; within a few generations local workshops were making Roman objects, sometimes with a Celtic touch in the decoration, as the page on Roman provincial art shows. Ireland was never conquered, and there the curving style lived on into the Christian centuries, which is how it reached the monks of the Insular world.
So the short answer to “what is Celtic art?” has two parts. In the strict sense, it is the art of Iron Age Europe, above all the La Tène style of curves on metal. In the popular sense, it also includes the medieval knotwork, which grew out of it but belongs to another world. Both are worth knowing, as long as you keep them apart.
Where to see it
The British Museum in London has the richest collection on display, with the Snettisham torcs, the Battersea Shield and the Basse-Yutz flagons, all in the rooms of the Iron Age galleries. The Gundestrup Cauldron is in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. In France, the Musée d’Archéologie nationale at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, and the museum at Châtillon-sur-Seine, with the Vix krater, cover the continental side.
Sources
- The British Museum, collection records for the Great Torc from Snettisham, the Battersea Shield and the Basse-Yutz flagons.
- National Museum of Denmark, “The Gundestrup Cauldron”.
- J. Farley and F. Hunter (eds), Celts: Art and Identity (London, British Museum Press, 2015).
- P. Jacobsthal, Early Celtic Art (Oxford, 1944).
- B. Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts (Oxford, 2nd ed. 2018).
- British Library, “Lindisfarne Gospels”.
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