ABSTRACT
Broadly contemporary with the Sword Styles, dating from the later fourth or third centuries bc, a range of artefacts, including personal ornaments, especially from the middle La Tène cemeteries of eastern Central Europe, developed a high-relief style of ornament which Jacobsthal defined as the ‘Plastic Style’. As its name implies, the Plastic Style is characterized by its three-dimensional, relief form, in English implying a moulded quality, as in modelling in the round with clay, but in the Continental European tradition comprising all forms of relief ornament, including that of more angular profile (Duval and Hawkes, 1976, 181). The fact that the Continental usage embraces both ‘soft’ and ‘sharp’ relief modelling does not mean, of course, that the two variants are the same (Jope, in Duval and Hawkes, 1976, 183), nor indeed that the relief technique implies a uniformity or concurrency of fashion. It is true that the preceding Waldalgesheim or Vegetal Style was also a low-relief style, but the later Plastic Style is different in degree, has a marked tendency to exaggerated swelling, and can include quite baroque clusters of relief elements. The crucial difference is that even with Waldalgesheim ornament it is possible to represent the design twodimensionally. With the Plastic Style, as Jacobsthal observed, there is ‘no clear borderline between decoration and what it decorates . . . cut off the spirals and you cut into the flesh’ (1944, 97).
