‘The Celts’: A Reflection of One Europe : Art: ‘The Original Europeans’ exhibit deals with a people who brought cultural unity to the Continent four centuries before the Roman Empire.

As Europe looks ahead to unification, Europeans from the Atlantic to the Black Sea are naturally wondering what this unity will look like. Part of that answer may come from an unlikely place, the Grand Canal in Venice, where the 18th-Century Palazzo Grassi recently opened “The Celts: The Original Europeans,” an exhibition of more than 2,400 objects from 24 countries.

In an 800-page catalogue, a team of curators from Italy, Ireland, France, Germany and Hungary do not argue that the Celts established an integrated continental system. In fact, the Celts never had a unified state, national borders and or even called themselves Celts. But in a vast, unprecedented display of Celtic objects, visitors can see the work of cultures that shared a surprising coherence in language, art and religion over a wide territorial expanse.

The Celts dominated Europe from the Iberian peninsula to the Carpathians for four centuries before Julius Caesar’s bloody campaigns vanquished them in the middle of the 1st Century BC. Still, does the fact that Celtic culture flourished among various groups throughout the Continent merit calling those cultures “The Original Europe,” as the curators do?

“The term is justified,” says Barry Raftery, a curator and archeologist from University College of Dublin specializing in Celtic culture. “Now, for the first time, you can talk about a cultural unity and migration over huge areas, bringing material from the Danube to southeast England, bringing material from France to the Carpathians. Had the Celts been unified politically, who knows what the subsequent future of Europe might have been?”

The effort to organize “The Celts” at the Palazzo Grassi serendipitously reinforces the notion of the Celts as the Continent’s cultural unifiers.

“During the preparation of the exhibition, the political situation of Europe changed,” says Sabatino Moscati, who headed the team of curators. “The artificial borders between Eastern and Western Europe were cut down. Then an extraordinary phenomenon appeared. The countries of Eastern Europe not only accepted our requests, but offered materials never loaned or published before. So, we could say that this exhibition is the first scholarly realization of the new political situation in Europe.”

“The sort of picture we’re trying to portray,” says Raftery, “is of a civilization that was not one of barbarism, which you might get if you read the Roman authors. It is a civilization which was highly sophisticated, highly cultivated, with a marvelous capacity of producing a wonderful art style--in terms of metalworking, one of the most significant, one of the most advanced that has ever existed in non-classical Europe.”

That picture begins with a human head (from the 2nd or 3rd Century BC) carved of ragstone, with carefully fringed hair, bulging eyes, and a swirling mustache that arcs above a deeply incised scowl. The exhibition’s earliest pieces--clay flagons, metal brooches and torques--come from 5th-Century BC burial grounds in what is now Halstatt, Austria.

“The Celtic art style is essentially an abstract art style,” says Raftery. “It is derived ultimately from the classical world, from the Greek and Etruscan world, and it first appears in Europe around 460 or 450 BC. It grows out of floral patterns, vegetal patterns which occur on Greek and Etruscan beakers and wine flagons. The Celtic craftsmen were attracted to the naturally inspired palmettes (and), lotus blossoms, but they did not slavishly copy anything. They adopted these floral patterns into continuous curvilinear motifs that flow and writhe and twist across the surfaces to be decorated--whether they are bronze, gold, stone, bone or leather.”

Those ornamental motifs inevitably found their way onto weapons and armor, which make up a huge section of this exhibition intended to dispel myths about Celtic belligerence.

By the middle of the 1st Century BC, Celtic culture vanished from continental Europe. Some Celts fled to Ireland, which the Romans never conquered. There they continued to create richly decorated metal objects, and it is from Ireland that we have the earliest written sources in Celtic. The exhibition gives special attention to Celtic imagery that survived in Christian manuscripts.

The exhibition--including murals, a forest environment and quotes from Roman writers--is designed by architect Gae Aulenti, who has designed eight international loan exhibitions at the Palazzo Grassi since she oversaw the restoration of the building that was completed in 1986.

The Palazzo Grassi is counting on the exhibition, which continues through early December, to surpass the success of a similar Aulenti-designed mega-show devoted to the Phoenicians in 1988 that drew more than 750,000 visitors--a staggering number for Italy.