Celtic art in Pagan and Christian times — A Closer Reading

Materials and Making

Allen devotes sustained attention to the raw substances of Celtic art. He observes that Irish scribes used parchment thicker than that of Carolingian manuscripts, and that their pens were likely cut from bird quills rather than reeds or brushes. The black ink is praised for its durability, and red pigment made from whelks is noted for its brilliance. For stone crosses, a preference for easily worked freestone is documented: fine-grained sandstone predominates, while granite appears in Cornwall and slate in the Isle of Man. Allen even records the marks of picks or pointed chisels on crosses, linking these tool traces to those found on Bronze Age cup-and-ring carvings. The unfinished cross at Kells, Co. Meath, is cited as evidence for the sequence of construction: the stone was squared, designs set out, and draughts cut across faces to leave high-relief portions for figure sculpture.

Continuities Across Eras

Allen structures his survey to highlight persistent motifs and techniques across pagan and Christian periods. The spiral ornament at Newgrange, carved on slabs outside the passage tomb, is compared to spiral designs on bronze axe-heads from Denmark and Sweden. The cup-and-ring sculptures on rock at Ilkley, Yorkshire, are juxtaposed with later Christian cross tool-marks. In metalwork, the same repertoire of enamelling, niello, repoussé, and filigree appears in both pagan and Christian contexts. Allen notes that soldering and brazing, if known, were little used; instead, rivets fixed metal pieces together. This emphasis on technical continuity—rather than rupture—shapes his argument that Celtic artistic traditions persisted through religious change, adapting forms without abandoning underlying methods.

The Evidence of Unfinished Works

Allen repeatedly turns to incomplete or damaged objects as sources of insight. The unfinished cross at Kells, formerly lying on the ground and only recently re-erected, reveals the stages of carving: squaring the stone, setting out the design, cutting draughts, and then sculpting figures in high relief. Similarly, the large broken cross at Iona shows that the quadrants of the circular ring connecting the arms were sometimes made in separate pieces. These fragments allow Allen to infer construction sequences that finished works obscure. He also examines tool marks on crosses and on Bronze Age rock carvings, treating them as direct evidence of the craftsman's hand. This focus on process over product gives the book a distinctive archaeological rigor, grounding aesthetic judgments in material practice.

Allen's book rewards readers who attend to its technical details—the thickness of vellum, the alloy of a brooch, the chisel marks on a cross. Rather than offering a sweeping narrative of Celtic art, it builds its case from the workshop up, trusting that the way an object was made reveals as much as its final form. Readers interested in the intersection of archaeology and craft will find here a methodical, evidence-driven account that respects the limits of what can be known from surviving fragments.

That rainy afternoon, tracing Allen’s patient diagrams of interlace, I kept thinking about hands—how they guide a chisel or a brush. Later, resting, my eye fell on The History of Modern Painting, Volume 1 (of 4) Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century — Reading Companion. It felt less like a leap than a turn of the page.