Celtiberian Bronze Horseman

This metalwork image was popular in Celtic times because you see it now in various museums.  There is something about the image that means I have to do some work with it.  Considering they didn’t have paper back then to fiddle with design, my guess is they used clay to plan it all out.  It would be good to build up the image with card or something to bring it forward.

I played with the photocopy to bring out detail that was virtually lost.  The object is solid and the outline shows this.  I can see what I want at the end of this in my head, but I can’t put it into words  yet.  I like it as it is, which fills me with a sense of duty, because I want to resurrect its glory, not diminish it.  Verdigris is a whole new bag and although this piece is basically jewellery, I don’t think I’m going down the bling road, but the archaeologists route instead.

Ok, so let’s say I found it at the bottom of a path during a long hike in Cornwall, where I was lost and really tired with no water and sore feet.  Then I see it before me, just to the side of where I am about to take my next step, covered in dirt, lost and unloved.  I pick it up, it looks rusty but really really old.  I decide there and then that before I hand it into the authorities, I must take it home and draw it.  I can see it might have been gold, but gold doesn’t rust, so it has to be bronze.  I see there are large jump rings on it, so this means it was hung on something...etc etc.

I digress...
For classical iconography of creatures that fed into visual culture, you’re basically looking at anything that was around in the Ice Age.  We have to face up to the fact that before we figured out how to ride them, to Ice Age cavemen, women and children, a horse was food.

The other thing to note about Ice Age creatures is our modern day preoccupation with elephants that clearly comes down to us from our relentless pursuance of Wooly Mammoths.  Entire migratory routes follow the Wooly Mammoth.  A mammoth represented a lot of food for a community.  You see hundreds of representations of mammoth carved into rocks and bones.  To dream of catching a mammoth, to hope and pray...

The thing I’m really stuck on though is dragons.  All depictions of dragons faithfully record scales, so the original terrifying beast must have been a serpent of some sort and also must have lived in either a cave or in the water that bore holes into the cave.

There is a giant Mesolithic snake that could have been the source of the original ‘dreaded dragon encounter’ methinks, but the fossil record shows it died out before Neolithic times.  My view is, because it was so big and scary and you had no chance of defeating it with rocks back then, as a continual source of fear it persisted in the psyche of descendants of very early man.  Virtually all cultures have a dragon and that’s fascinating too, because so far they’ve only found fossils in Columbia of this big snake monster thing.

But saying that, the famous Irish Elk, which is another massive creature from cave man Ice Age days was actually a native of a huge expanse of the northern hemisphere, not just Ireland. So we have to take care with the names of these finds, so as not to restrict our understanding of their prevalence in the culture.  In my view, Scythian stag representation harks back to the giant Ice Age Irish Elk, but that’s only my own opinion from staring at so many luscious Scythian gold artefacts.