Celtic Art in Transition During the First Century BC : An Examination of the Creations of Mint Masters and Metal Smiths, and an Analysis of Stylistic Development During the Phase Between la Tene and Provincial Roman

It should become apparent in reading this work that the use of silver as a medium for artwork among metalworkers in the barbaricum regions of Europe during the La Tene period was not confined to eastern Europe, where its importance has been widely recognized. Silver was an important medium for La Tene artwork in western Europe as well. During the Middle La Tene period Celtiberian artisans excelled in the production of decorated silver items. During the Late La Tene period decorated silver items were made in Gaul as well. Thus, a tangible outcome of this research is the establishment of the Gaulish origins of the Gundestrup cauldron, the Sark-type phalerae, the Hildesheim and Neerharen vases, and the cups from Lyon, Thorey, and Alesia. All of these items were made of silver, and all dateto the first century BC. Also Gaulish and of the same first-century-BC metalworking schools were the Marlborough vat, the Aylesford bucket, the Rynkeby cauldron, all of which either were made of or were decorated with bronze. This work establishes also that the decorative motifs on most examples of European metalwork created during the first century BC, from both the East and the West, apart from those made in Greece and Italy, were driven by the numismatic art of each region's respective coinage. During the first century BC in the barbaricum regions of Europe there was an overlap in the repertory between the art in the small on the coins and the art in the large on the metalwork. This overlap validates the utility of using the coinage to determine a fuller view of the first-century-BC artistic lexicon. Because there are hundreds of type examples of the various tribal issues of coins, the basicrepertory of the first-century-BC art style can be seen to have been preserved through this numismatic medium. Thus the coinage provides a much more complete inventory of the first-century-BC artistic motif repertory than that presented by the few surviving items of large-scale metalwork. Indeed in many cases the coinage provides an actual stage-by-stage outline of the evolutionary development of the motif repertory.Olmsted, Garrett S. is the author of 'Celtic Art in Transition During the First Century BC : An Examination of the Creations of Mint Masters and Metal Smiths, and an Analysis of Stylistic Development During the Phase Between la Tene and Provincial Roman', published 2001 under ISBN 9789638046376 and ISBN 9638046376.