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ROMANIZATION IN ART
Art shows a rather different picture. Here we reach definite survivals
of Celtic traditions. There flourished in Britain before the Claudian
conquest a vigorous native art, chiefly working in metal and enamel, and
characterized by its love for spiral devices and its fantastic use of
animal forms. This art--La Tène or Late Celtic or whatever it be
styled--was common to all the Celtic lands of Europe just before the
Christian era, but its vestiges are particularly clear in Britain. When
the Romans spread their dominion over the island, it almost wholly
vanished. For that we are not to blame any evil influence of this
particular Empire. All native arts, however beautiful, tend to disappear
before the more even technique and the neater finish of town
manufactures. The process is merely part of the honour which a coherent
civilization enjoys in the eyes of country folk. Disraeli somewhere
describes a Syrian lady preferring the French polish of a western boot
to the jewels of an eastern slipper. With a similar preference the
British Celt abandoned his national art and adopted the Roman provincial
fashion.
He did not abandon it entirely. Little local manufactures of pottery or
fibulae testify to its sporadic survival. Such are the brooches with
Celtic affinities made (as it seems) near Brough (Verterae) in
Westmorland, and the New Forest urns with their curious leaf ornament
(Fig. 14),[1] and above all the Castor ware from the banks of the Nen,
five miles west of Peterborough. We may briefly examine this last
instance.[2] At Castor and Chesterton, on the north and south sides of
the river, were two Romano-British settlements of comfortable houses,
furnished in genuine Roman style. Round them were extensive pottery
works. The ware, or at least the most characteristic of the wares, made
in these works is generally known as Castor or Durobrivian ware. Castor
was not, indeed, its only place of manufacture. It was produced freely
in northern Gaul, and possibly elsewhere in Britain.[3] But Castor is
the best known and best attested manufacturing centre, and the easiest
for us to examine. The ware directly embodies the Celtic tradition.
It is based, indeed, on classical elements, foliated scrolls,
hunting scenes, and occasionally mythological representations (Figs. 15,
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. But it recasts these elements with the vigour of a true art and in
accordance with its special tendencies. Those fantastic animals with
strange out-stretched legs and backturned heads and eager eyes; those
tiny scrolls scattered by way of decoration above or below them; the
rude beading which serves, not ineffectively, for ornament or for
dividing line; the suggestion of returning spirals; the evident delight
of the artist in plant and animal forms and his neglect of the human
figure--all these are Celtic. When we turn to the rarer scenes in which
man is specially prominent--a hunt, or a gladiatorial show, or Hesione
fettered naked to a rock and Hercules saving her from the
monster[4]--the vigour fails (Fig. 17). The artist could not or would
not cope with the human form. His nude figures, Hesione and Hercules,
and his clothed gladiators are not fantastic but grotesque. They retain
traces of Celtic treatment, as in Hesione's hair. But the general
treatment is Roman. The Late Celtic art is here sinking into the general
conventionalism of the Roman provinces.
[Footnote 1: For the New Forest ware see the Victoria Hist. of
Hampshire, i. 326, and Archaeol. Journal, xxx. 319. The Brough
brooches have been pointed out by Sir A.J. Evans, whose work on Late
Celtic Art is the foundation of all that has since been written on it,
but have not been discussed in detail.]
[Footnote 2: Victoria Hist. of Northamptonshire, i. 206-13; Artis,
Durobrivae of Antoninus (fol. 1828).]
[Footnote 3: For the Belgic 'Castor ware' see the Belgian Bulletin des
commissions royales d'art et d'archéologie (passim); H. du Cleuziou,
Poterie gauloise (Paris, 1872), Fig. 173, from Cologne; Sammlung
Niessen (Köln, 1911), plates lxxxvii, lxxxviii; Brongniart, _Traité des
arts céram., pl. xxix (Ghent and Rheinzabern). M. Salomon Reinach tells
me that the ware is not infrequent in the departments of the valleys of
the Seine, Marne, and Oise. The Colchester gladiator's urn mentioning
the Thirtieth Legion (C.R. Smith, Coll. Ant., iv. 82, C. vii. 1335, 3)
may well be of Rhenish manufacture.]
[Footnote 4: This, or the corresponding scene of Perseus and Andromeda,
is a favourite with artists in northern Gaul and Britain. It occurs on
tombstones at Chester (Grosvenor Museum Catalogue, No. 138) and Trier
(Hettner, Die röm. Steindenkmäler zu Trier, p. 206), and Arlon
(Wiltheim, Luciliburgensia, plate 57), and the Igel monument. For
other instances see Roscher's Lexikon Mythol., under 'Hesione'.]
[Illustration: FIG. 14. FRAGMENTS OF NEW FOREST POTTERY WITH LEAF
PATTERNS. (From Archaeologia).]
[Illustration: Fig. 15. URNS FROM CASTOR, NOW IN PETERBOROUGH MUSEUM.
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41)]
[Illustration: FIG. 16. HUNTING SCENES FROM CASTOR WARE (ARTIS,
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