Celtic La Tène Art: Spirals, Torcs, and the Iron Age Sacred
Between approximately 500 BCE and the Roman conquest, the Celtic peoples of Europe produced one of the most distinctive and sophisticated decorative arts in human history — the La Tène style, named after the Swiss site where its characteristic objects were first identified. La Tène art is not realistic: it does not depict the world as it appears to the eye. It depicts the world as it appears to a mind that perceives the underlying patterns of living things — the spiral that is simultaneously a plant tendril, a wave, and a serpent; the animal whose body dissolves into foliage and reforms as another animal; the human face that emerges and dissolves in a field of abstract decoration. The masterpieces of La Tène art — the Gundestrup Cauldron with its panels of gods and sacred animals, the Battersea Shield inlaid with red enamel and bronze, the golden torcs of Snettisham — represent the Celtic cosmos as it was understood: a world of continuous transformation in which the boundaries between ...