Ancient art was largely, but not entirely, based on the nine great ancient civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, China, Rome, India, the Celtic peoples, and Maya.

The Book of Kells, a world-famous manuscript produced by Celtic Monks in AD 800 and an example of Insular art, is on display in Trinity College.

The Glasgow School, which developed in the late 19th century, and flourished in the early 20th century, produced a distinctive blend of influences including the Celtic Revival the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Japonisme, which found favour throughout the modern art world of continental Europe and helped define the Art Nouveau style.

Pictish art can be classed as Celtic, and later as Insular.

It uses a distinctive form of the general Celtic Early Medieval development of La Tène style with increasing influences from the Insular art of 7th and 8th century Ireland and Northumbria, and then Anglo-Saxon and Irish art as the Early Medieval period continues.

Northumbria played an important role in the formation of Insular art, a unique style combining Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Pictish, Byzantine and other elements, producing works such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, St Cuthbert Gospel, the Ruthwell Cross and Bewcastle Cross, and later the Book of Kells, which was probably created at Iona.

Whether it was or not, Iona was certainly important in the formation of Insular art, which combined Mediterranean, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Pictish elements into a style of which the book of Kells is a late example.

Category: Celtic art

Celtic knots are a variety of knots and stylized graphical representations of knots used for decoration, used extensively in the Celtic style of Insular art.

Interesting developments in the artistic use of interlaced knot patterns are found in Byzantine architecture and book illumination, Coptic art, Celtic art, Islamic art, Medieval Russian book illumination, Ethiopian art, and European architecture and book illumination.

Spirals, step patterns, and key patterns are dominant motifs in Celtic art before the Christian influence on the Celts, which began around 450 A. D.

J. Romilly Allen has identified " eight elementary knots which form the basis of nearly all the interlaced patterns in Celtic decorative art ".

In modern times Celtic art is popularly thought of in terms of national identity and therefore specifically Irish, Scottish or Welsh.

The manuscript is one of the finest works in the unique style of Hiberno-Saxon or Insular art, combining Mediterranean, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic elements.

In the Gospels there is a strong presence of Celtic, Germanic, and Irish art styles.

The spiral style and “ knot work ” evident in the formation of the designed pages are influenced by Celtic art ( Backhouse 1981, 47 ).

It now houses the city museum with its large archeological collection of Roman and Celtic artifacts, a hostel, a small arts and crafts museum as well as the collection of 20th century and ethnological art donated by feminist journalist and politician Louise Weiss.

Other Celtic languages have similar words, such as Old Irish art, Welsh arth-which may also be the source for the modern name Arthur.

Further, some older forms of Celtic music that are rare in Scotland and Ireland today, such as practice of accompanying a fiddle with a piano, or the Gaelic spinning songs of Cape Breton remain common in the Maritimes.

The Gaulish and Brythonic forms likely derive from Proto-Celtic * louk ( k ) et -, " bright, shining, flashing ," hence also " lightning ," in reference to either a Celtic commonplace metaphor between battles and thunderstorms ( Old Irish torannchless, the " thunder feat "), or the divine aura of the hero ( the lúan of Cú Chulainn ).

Archaic crossed forms of theta are seen in the wheel letters of Linear A, Linear B, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, the mathematical tensor product, exclusive disjunction, and direct sum operators, the identification symbol for the Earth ( as already mentioned ), and the Celtic cross.

Other early examples of mutual surety and assurance pacts can be traced back to various forms of fellowship within the Saxon clans of England and their Germanic forbears, and to Celtic society.

Musicians from the British Isles also developed some distinctive forms of music, including Celtic chant, the Contenance Angloise, the rota, polyphonic votive antiphons and the carol in the medieval era.

In some forms of Wicca which incorporate aspects of Celtic mythology, the cauldron is associated with the goddess Cerridwen.

The Synod of Whitby in 664 forms a significant watershed in that King Oswiu of Northumbria decided to follow Roman rather than Celtic practices.

In these compositions there may be an element of parody, born of the rivalry in the sixth and seventh centuries between Roman and Celtic forms of Christianity.

Malcolm III appears to have introduced sheriffs as part of a policy of replacing native " Celtic " forms of government with Anglo Saxon and Norman feudal structures.

The style saw a fusion between the traditions of Celtic art, the Germanic Migration period art of the Anglo-Saxons and the Christian forms of the book, high crosses and liturgical metalwork.

Finally, growing interest in Celtic mysticism, folk spirituality and alternative forms of religion has attracted new age activists to the supposed goddess aspects of Brigit.

Malcolm III appears to have introduced sheriffs as part of a policy of replacing native " Celtic " forms of government with Norman feudal structures.

* the Celtic * uiro-' man '; and the older forms viros, viri, viro, viron from which derived the Old Irish word for man, fir ;

Perhaps the most widespread and lasting contribution of the Revival was the re-introduction of the Celtic Cross shape used in the medieval high crosses, which now forms a familiar part of monumental and funerary art over most of the Westernized world.

Interlace, which is still seen as a " Celtic " form of decoration, somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art, has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature.

Indeed, while his buildings could be spare and crisp in their principal masses, he often punctuated their plain surfaces with eruptions of lush Art Nouveau and something like Celtic Revival decorations, usually cast in iron or terra cotta, and ranging from organic forms like vines and ivy, to more geometric designs, and interlace, inspired by his Irish design heritage.

The Millennium Coastal Path cycleway forms a section of both the Celtic Trail cycle route ( part of NCR 47 ) and the National Cycle Network NCR 4.

Gray was a schoolboy international for Scotland, he had aspirations of signing for his boyhood team Celtic, but signed professional forms for Leeds at the age of 16.

The sounds, grammatical forms, and syntactical types, with a few exceptions, are derived from Latin, but the vocabulary has absorbed a number of Germanic and Arabic words, and a few have Celtic origin.

Over the more recent years, during a period of rapid economic growth in Ireland known as the ' Celtic Tiger ', Kilkee underwent considerable expansion with the development of hotels, estates and other forms of housing.

The emergence of folk-rock led to the creation of a popular music genre labelled Celtic music which " frequently involves the blending of traditional and modern forms, e. g. the Celtic-punk of The Pogues, the ambient music of Enya ... the Celtic-rock of Runrig, Rawlins Cross and Horslips.

* The ongoing struggle between Celtic and Roman forms of Christianity for supremacy in the British Isles.

In this letter he defended the Celtic custom with considerable freedom but the tone is affectionate.

However there is considerable evidence, both in the texts and from the wider Celtic world, that they were once considered deities.

During his travels he had amassed considerable materials for a work he had projected on etymology, entitled A Comparative Lexicon of the English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Celtic Languages.

The Iron Age in northern Europe is markedly distinct from the Celtic La Tène culture south of it, whose advanced iron-working technology exerted a considerable influence in the north, when, around 600 BC northern people began to extract bog iron from the ore in peat bogs, a technology acquired from their Central European neighbours.

In addition to collecting Norwegian folksongs and traditions and writing on Runic inscriptions, he made considerable contributions to the study of the Celtic, Romance, Oscan, Umbrian and Etruscan languages.

Most of the monuments, and their accompanying inscriptions, belong to the Roman period and reflect a considerable degree of syncretism between Celtic and Roman gods ; even where figures and motifs appear to derive from pre-Roman tradition, they are difficult to interpret in the absence of a preserved literature on mythology.