The celtic art
The genesis of Celtic art lays in the molding together of several disparate styles into something quite unique and distinctive. Beneath everything lays indigenous Halstatt modes of decoration - a sense of contrasting colors and textures, but a style essentially foursquare and geometric. Superimposed upon this was the art of the classical world interpreted particularly through its Graeco-Etruscan manifestations. Bronze vessels decorated with palmettes and tendrils flooded into the Celtic world and into the households of the chieftains. A third more shadowy, element, came from the east, through by what mechanism is unknown. Eastern Europe had for some while been settled by peoples closely related to the scythians practicing their own exquisite style of animal art.
Upon this was superimposed a Persian flavor. Perhaps the craftsmen serving this strange hybrid of Greek, Scythian, and Persian migrated to the west - perhaps it was little more than traded goods, saddle cloths, leatherwork, and fabric wall hangings that brought the eastern flavour to the courts of the Celtic aristocracy. At any event, in the earliest manifestation of a truly Celtic art known as the Early Strict Style - Celtic, yet of recognizable parentage. In the ensuing centuries Celtic art became an expression of the Celtic spirit. They developed what is called the Free Style: free graphic for its two dimensional form, free plastic when in three dimensions. It is a style, which eschews bilateral symmetry and adapts style to form - elements grow and die away again and everything is in a state of tense balance. Finally, growing with the world of Rome, introducing new standards of formality and leading to the emergence of more stable, urban forms of government, gives rise to a more staid art style which reflects the change of the times.
