(V) Conclusion: Celtic Europe and the Mediterranean.

Celtic style developed indigenously out of the early Urnfield beginnings, through the Hallstatt and into the early La Tène period. The developments may be compared with the Greek change from Orientalizing to Archaic to Classical; radical stylistic change takes place within a relatively stable cultural group. Postulations of invasions, racial or population shifts, or large-scale immigrations are no longer necessary to explain cultural change in either area. During the long era from the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C.E., contact with Mediterranean art took place in the form of importation of objects; the stylistic development, however, is unaffected by southern "influence."

Constant contact with eastern and northern neighbors with similar societal structures brought about an "Orientalizing" of Celtic art, with the introduction of elements of the Scythian/Thraco-Cimmerian Animal Style. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Orientalizing elements were transmitted through the filter of Greece or Etruria. Etruscan and North Italian (Este and Golasecca) art found its way easily to the Alps and northward; there is again some cultural similarity between the peoples of west-central Europe and the northern Italians, and a range of identical vessels and utensils were made on both sides of the Alps. It is important to emphasize that in all of the cases mentioned in which a foreign motif or stylistic element was introduced into the Celtic repertoire, it was immediately and unmistakably appropriated into the Celtic artistic language. Thus, zoomorphic creatures, floral elements, geometric patterns, disembodied heads, or vessel forms, for example, do not undergo any lengthy transition from copy to adaptation to transformation. When such an element appears in Celtic art, it appears in Celtic style.

More interesting, perhaps, than the short list of imported motifs is the enormous range of Mediterranean interests that clearly held no attraction for the Celts and were consistently rejected in favor of local priorities. The historian may ask why the Celts refused to write down their stories, or why they did not build monumental stone architecture. The art-historian notes the rejection of figural, narrative art, of illusionism, and of the logic of Greek floral and geometric ornament in favor of abstraction, stylization, dismemberment and curvilinear ornament that denies distinctions between foreground and background. Celtic metalwork is highly sculptural, while retaining linear articulation, rejecting the classical Greek striving for integration of sculptural form and surface. Celtic pottery is never decorated with figural scenes; instead, its ornaments are polychrome and textural. In short, Celtic producers and consumers alike neither perceived an inferiority or lack in their own fully developed stylistic and craft traditions, nor did they look to the Mediterranean as the "center" from which artistic influences were to be adopted.

The art-historical ramifications of this reinterpretation of the origins of Celtic art have only been adumbrated here. Stylistic analyses that seek classical prototypes for Celtic design elements are beside the point of what the Celtic artists do with that material -- what is Celtic about Celtic art. When it is not seen as peripheral to, and derivative of, the Greek artistic tradition, the Celtic aesthetic reveals itself as sharply distinct from, and essentially incompatible with, that of Greece and Hellenized Italy.

Mainstream art history currently tends to regard Iron Age Europe as tangential to contemporary cultures in the Mediterranean, at best as a forerunner to the artistic developments of later Western Europe. Popular surveys give the art of this period short shrift, concentrating instead on the naturalistic, representational arts of classical Greece and Rome. It is my contention that any history of Western art that disregards the Celtic alternative ignores one of the vital issues in twentieth century thought about art. At the beginning of Western art, the conflict between non-illusionistic abstraction and naturalistic representation was already well established. A narrow, Hellenocentric view of the history of Western art ignores the tensions underlying the two rival developments, and thus does justice neither to Greece, in placing it in splendid and artificial isolation, nor to Europe, in silencing its alternative voice. Study of Western art must take the early Celtic style into account, not as a peripheral development on the fringes of the classical Mediterranean world, but as a powerful and influential way of looking at and imaging the world.