ABSTRACT
The arts of early Iron Age Europe are highly complex and abstract products of a stylistic development that is as yet poorly understood. The period of the transition from late Hallstatt to early La Tène in the fifth century B.C.E. is particularly rich in information about internal artistic developments, regional cultural change, and important aspects of the relations between west-central Europe and the Mediterranean, particularly classical Greece. Studies of Celtic art have concentrated largely on the relationship between the Celts and the Greeks. The Greeks, Romans, and many modern scholars have seen the Celts as barbarians living on the periphery of "higher" Mediterranean civilizations. Underlying most interpretations of Celtic art has been the assumption that when the ancient Celts imported Greek goods and included them in their funerary assemblages, they imported Greek ideas and customs as well. In addition, the stylistic change in Celtic art in the fifth century B.C.E. has been ascribed to imitation of Greek art, the product of external stimuli and the desire to emulate the Greeks. The study of specific works of Celtic art in their regional, local and artistic context demonstrates that Iron Age Europe was an important center of artistic production and innovation in its own right. Archaeology reveals that the Celtic lands were economically and politically independent of Greece. Local funerary customs and beliefs explain the mortuary assemblages. Finally, stylistic change is the product of a local, indigenous, and remarkably un-classical aesthetic development.
Celtic art is removed in this study from the periphery of Western art history and restored to its rightful place as a rival style that consciously rejected Greek figural representation in favor of non-illusionistic abstraction.
A detailed discussion of my methodological approach, projected hypertext presentation format, and travel plans is available here.
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