Melting pot

‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of languages, a temperament, a style of art and a fringe, once the stronghold of the Liberal Democrats. But who are — and were — the Celts? The curators of the new British Museum exhibition are not at all sure, and that’s one of the reasons why the result is so enthralling.

There is a familiar answer to this question: the Celts were an ancient people who moved into Europe from the east in prehistoric times and occupied most areas north and east of the Alps, together with northern Italy and much of the Balkans. They spoke a kindred group of languages and created a style of art that continued to evolve from the 5th century BC into the Middle Ages. This luxuriantly decorative idiom, full of elegantly looping lines and densely knotted decoration, inspired the Romantics of the 19th-century Celtic revival, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frances and Margaret Macdonald, and ended up as a distinctive Scottish variety of art nouveau.

The trouble with this story, according to the accompanying book, is that a lot of it — apart from the revival part — is oversimplified, dubious and just wrong, and generally worked out by looking backwards at the distant past. ‘The idea of Celtic art,’ the authors point out, ‘was a Victorian creation.’ A good look at the Gundestrup cauldron brings out the complexities of the situation.

In any case, it is worth spending a long while gazing at this fabulous object (the star exhibit, among some tough competition). This is a massive silver bowl, with panels in low relief that bear the heads of gods and goddesses, strange beasts including what seem to be elephants, and a figure with antlers on his head holding a horned serpent in one hand, a torc in the other and wearing a Corbynesque costume of vest and long johns.