IIt was the ancient Egyptians who started making naturalistic life-size, if static, representations of the human body, and the Greeks who endowed the figures with movement in both sculpture and painting. The Hellenic ideal of beauty was adopted by the Romans and revitalised through the Renaissance, and it has remained the aspiration of artists on canvas or in the round down to our own day. But the prehistoric Celts on the Continent were disinterested in naturalism, and played around so much with the human form—particularly the face—that the essential elements of eyes, nose and mouth were sometimes only barely recognisable in their novel artistic configurations. This was a freedom of design which broke away from the constraints of classical formulae and allowed the craftsman to develop his own ideas in an untrammelled fashion, and enabled him also to infuse his images with new force and meaning.

Yet this stylisation of the human face and figure is something that was practised by the prehistoric Irish long before the Celts ever came to our shores (whenever that may have been). The superbly elegant curves and spirals on the five-thousand-year old Knowth macehead (Fig 1) provide us with all the suitably-reduced components so that we can recognise in it a human face which is far removed from the realism of a Greek vase-painter or the product of Michelangelo’s mallet and chisel. Carved from intractable flint, it is part of a mysterious fantasy world, more ritual than real, and a chef d’oeuvre of the European Stone Age which abounds with strength through astounding craftsmanship.

Three thousand years later, Celtic La Tène metalworkers in Ireland used analogous curvilinear elements in different, yet equally masterly, ways—and probably also in the service of ritual—to induce us to see eyes and mouth behind a graceful series of spirals raised in relief above the surface of a circular bronze dish like that from Monasterevan, Co. Kildare, now in the National Museum (Fig 3).

Stylisation can equally be observed in the great manuscript Books of Durrow and Kells in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, but it is the 9th-century high crosses in stone which confront us for the first time in Ireland with the differences between the stylised and the naturalistic representations of the human form, best exemplified in the juxtaposition of crosses from Moone, Co. Kildare, and Monasterboice, Co. Louth. Moone cannot but bring a smile to our faces with the naïve static simplicity and graphic charm of its twelve apostles, executed by a master of flat relief in a timeless tradition (Fig 6). Monasterboice, in contrast, has figures in high, rounded, relief, demanding our respect through the statuesque figures of realistic (if occasionally squat) proportions which would give visiting Martians a better idea of what we humans on planet earth actually look like (Fig 7).

The sudden appearance of this naturalistic carving with fleshy figures in rounded relief suggests that Ireland did indeed have visitors, but most likely from the European mainland of Charlemagne and his sons, who found inspiration in the sculptural heritage from the Roman world of Classical antiquity in creating a Carolingian Renaissance in the arts.

This phase of naturalism inIrish stone-carving did not long out-last the Carolingian Empire and, in remarkable bronzework such as the St John’s crucifixion plaque and the Soiscél Molaise shrine (both in the National Museum), the country can be seen to have continued the native tradition of stylisation from the first into the second millennium. The latter brought with it a new brand of stylisation in the form of Romanesque, whose arcane yet wonderful artistic language the Irish embraced and made their own, as we can see from 12th-century church portals and chancel arches in the country. At Kilteel, Co. Kildare, we find typically-Irish capitals bearing reasonably naturalistic human faces, but with hair plaited back into a complicated interlace which is as difficult to unravel as the meaning behind many Romanesque carvings (Fig 2).

In the later Middle Ages, the International Gothic style permeated Ireland, and re-introduced the more naturalistic figure style that we know particularly from tomb-sculpture originally of Norman inspiration, but which ultimately went beyond the bounds of the Pale where their rule held sway. But, even then, stylisation of a kind could creep in as on a 16th-century crucifixion from Fertagh in north Kilkenny that is now preserved in the grounds of Johnstown Catholic church adjoining the Dublin-Cork road. The varying lengths of the sinewy legs, and more particularly, the stylised arm muscles of the Christ figure make it look forward to the sculpture of the 20th century (Fig 4). Its subject, if not quality, was imitated in many a western Irish crucifixion plaque of the 1620s and 1630s, such as that in the north transept of the cathedral at Kilmacduagh, Co. Galway (Fig 5). The descent into a folk art of varying quality can be seen in the course of the following two centuries in the penal crucifixes (probably produced as souvenirs for pilgrims visiting St Patrick’s Purgatory in Donegal’s Lough Derg), which have an appealing simplicity that contrasts so strikingly with all the fine paintings and statues which bring us back to the noble figures of ultimately classical derivation that dominate the artistic scene in Ireland throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

With the Celtic revival in the decades on either side of 1900, we suddenly experience an intentional resurgence of the stylisation of a millennium earlier. This was not simply a reaction to the sentimental naturalism that pervaded the Victorian period, but a purposeful and political manifestation of true nationalistic feeling in the country which is well expressed in the beautiful 1926 metalwork and enamel tabernacle by Mia Cranwill in St Michael’s Church in Ballinasloe, Co. Galway. This fine piece of craftsmanship is a cleverly-worked descendant of the early Irish medieval metalwork shrines of a thousand years earlier, yet giving a new ‘twist’ to the figures of Christ and his Apostles, and providing novel ways of applying enamel to the decoration in an ingenious composition that deliberately evokes memories of the great days of Celtic Ireland.

Inspiration of a very different kind which led to stylisation—almost to the point of abstraction—was the Cubist movement as seen in the work of Mainie Jellett, where Parisian style was adapted to Italian composition in an Irish context in her Virgin of Eire in the National Gallery. There, we can just make out the Virgin and Child flanked on each side by a single figure in symphonic movements of curving colour blended into a very pleasing whole. Throughout his life, Louis le Brocquy, too, has been weaving his magic in avoiding the naturalistic when producing his wraith-like figures in various colours. The same can probably also be said of the heads he has painted of well-known personalities, living and dead, where we can peer through the brush-stokes to identify the faces of those whom we can recognise from well-known photos and from more naturalistic representations.

Even if I have to depart from my chosen theme of the human figure and face, I cannot conclude this brief essay without mentioning one master in the stylisation of animals, and that is Conor Fallon, whose metalwork birds encapsulate the best of Irish stylisation (Fig 8). They are among the most recent and welcome expressions of a tendency towards the stylised in Irish art and craft that goes back to the passage graves of the Boyne Valley and elsewhere. During this span of five thousand years, we can see how stylisation comes and goes, dominant at some periods, yet fighting for attention at others against the pervasive influence of the classical ideal of the human figure. Yet it is always an ever-present fire which flickers or flames through Irish art, making us see things differently, and training the eye to look beyond the classical and the naturalistic to a magic world of fantasy which never fails to excite and delight.

Peter Harbison is an archaeologist and author of Ireland’s Treasures, 5000 Years of Artistic Expression 2004 Hugh Lauter Levin Associates.