CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION IN CELTIC AND MEDITERRANEAN ORNAMENT. A GRAMMATICAL-SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF THE PROCESSES OF RECEPTION AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE DECORATIVE ARTS OF ANTIQUITY

The ornament of the Celtic peoples of Transalpine Europe resulted initially from the impact of imported late Archaic and Classical Greek and Etruscan decorative arts. Subsequently, Celtic ornament continued to draw upon Southern or Greco-Italic arts, although these borrowings were increasingly altered or transformed as Celtic art achieved a more distinctive identity.;The earliest Celtic ornament of the fifth century B.C. (Early Style) represents an anachronistic but selective borrowing of areally discrete patterns of sub-Orientalizing or sub-Archaic type, probably conditioned by the similar structure of pre-La Tene ornament in Central Europe. Subsequently, the Celts developed patterns with a continuous structure as hypotactically junctured strings of elements incorporating features from Classical tendril ornament (Waldalgesheim Style). These strings were then elaborated using complex and perimetral aggregates of Southern derivation, or transformed into closed string aggregates and network strings of purely Celtic type (Waldalgesheim sub-styles).;This Continental Celtic legacy evolved further in the British Isles to produce more complex types of closed string aggregates and network strings, as well as new open string aggregates and mass compositions. These pattern structures continued in the latest La Tene ornament of Britain and Ireland, and in the La Tene derivative ornament of Late Antiquity which also assimilated more complex types of mass composition from Mediterranean meander and interlace patterns.;In conclusion, Celtic ornament emerges as one long continuous and internally motivated artistic phenomenon. Borrowings from Mediterranean ornament were highly selective, and such borrowings were consistently and thoroughly re-integrated within a distinctive and essentially independent Celtic artistic tradition.;The study of the Celtic transformations of Southern ornament requires a more objective and consistent means of formal analysis. Patterns are intelligible as groupings of basic two-dimensional components or elements. These may be arranged with an areally discrete structure as proximate, tangent, or conterminous forms, and also as areally continuous series connected by juncture. These arrangements may be characterized more precisely on the analogy of the syntactic structure of words in language, as paratactic and hypotactic connections. Larger aggregates of elements consist of serial arrangements, as strings, and more elaborate structures, perimetral and complex aggregates, and still more elaborate closed string aggregates, network strings, and valenced mass compositions.