French Visiting Scholar Lecture Series: Laurent Olivier & Nathalie Ginoux

The Department of Art History is pleased to present a joint lecture on the topic of Celtic Art, as part of our ongoing French Visiting Scholar Lecture Series. Lunch will be served at this event, and details on the speakers and talks can be found below. All are welcome, and we hope to see you there!

"The Visuality of Early Celtic Art: For an Archaeology of Images"
Dr. Laurent Olivier
General Curator of the Department of Celtic and Gallic Archaeology
National Museum of Archaeology, Saint-Germain-en-Laye (France)

The images produced by the ancient civilizations or cultures are most often approached as manifestations of archaeological styles, and interpreted as semiological productions of past societies. But what about the images themselves? How were they constructed – as images – and according to which rules or constraints? Is it possible to reconstruct the properties of the visual space in which they are projected, and what does it tell us about the transformations of these images along time?

"Protohistoric Art in Debate: The Case of Ancient Celtic Art"
Professor Nathalie Ginoux
Chair of History of Art and Archaeology of the Celtic World
Sorbonne University

This conference will examine the question of protohistoric art from the point of view of ancient Celtic art, that of the Celts of the Second Iron Age who occupied Middle Europe during the last millennium BC. The Celts are defined here as speakers of Celtic languages, and their art is described as 'Celtic' because it corresponds, like language, to a unifying element of diverse groups of populations and societies, sharing the same culture, in geography and in time. In the absence of any direct literary testimony relating to the mythical corpus and spiritual doctrines, artistic production is the irreplaceable source for approaching the system of thought of the ancient Celts at the centre of a system of verbal and visual communication.

We will try to show that during the period between the 5th and 3rd centuries B.C. the changes observed in the iconographic system of the populations of Inner Europe present all the characteristics of the implementation of a visual revolution. What happened around 450 BC to bring about such a profound and lasting change in the visual system that had prevailed since at least the end of the Bronze Age?