ABSTRACT
The style in which images of deities were presented may be as significant as the gods they portrayed. Through examining how artists and patrons envisaged divine entities, we are able to gain some idea as to attitudes towards the supernatural. One method of representation which differs from naturalism is multiplicity, considered in the previous chapter. Here, we may observe two further ways in which absence of realism in art-style impinges upon the relationship between humankind and the gods: emphasis on the one hand and abstraction on the other. The function of both kinds of representation is similar in that it desecularizes and transforms reality into something appropriate for the divine, through the transmutation of a mundane image to the sublime context of the supernatural.1 With both stress and schematism, the artist may have been making a deliberate attempt at dehumanizing a given image. Thus, a schematic depiction may present a deity merely as a scratched ‘matchstickman’ with no bodily details what-soever. Or an image may be apparently badly proportioned, with no attempt to make the torso the correct size in relation to the limbs. Hands or heads may be grossly exaggerated. What is revealed by observation of these styles is not incompetence, but either a deliberate form of image-making or, at very least, the realization that realism was not necessary within a Celtic religious milieu.
