Melting pot

‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of languages, a temperament, a style of art and a fringe, once the stronghold of the Liberal Democrats. But who are — and were — the Celts? The curators of the new British Museum exhibition are not at all sure, and that’s one of the reasons why the result is so enthralling.

There is a familiar answer to this question: the Celts were an ancient people who moved into Europe from the east in prehistoric times and occupied most areas north and east of the Alps, together with northern Italy and much of the Balkans. They spoke a kindred group of languages and created a style of art that continued to evolve from the 5th century BC into the Middle Ages. This luxuriantly decorative idiom, full of elegantly looping lines and densely knotted decoration, inspired the Romantics of the 19th-century Celtic revival, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frances and Margaret Macdonald, and ended up as a distinctive Scottish variety of art nouveau.