CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- This spring, the Harvard Art Museums present Celtic Art Across the Ages, an exhibition that explores Celtic art from the Iron Age to the early medieval period as well as Celtic Revival works from modern times. Showcasing exciting archaeological discoveries, the exhibition offers an unprecedented opportunity to view, among other objects, masterful examples of arms and armor, jewelry, feasting wares, and horse and chariot trappings found in France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Britain, and Ireland over the last two hundred years. This first major exhibition on the topic in the United States brings together nearly three hundred objects, including significant loans drawn mostly from museums in Europe; it is on display March 6 through August 2, 2026, at the Harvard Art Museums. A print catalogue featuring over 30 essays by international specialists accompanies the exhibition.

There is no universal definition of “Celtic”; Celticness means different things to different people in different contexts. Similarly, Celtic art is not a homogeneous, unified body of material. Celtic art is typically defined by its ornament. It first flourished in central and western Europe in the mid-first millennium BCE, during the Iron Age. The distinctive designs that characterize Celtic art in a given place and period belong to a larger repertory of forms that developed in the fifth century BCE and changed over the following 1,500 years as it reached different regions and interacted with other artistic traditions. In early medieval Ireland and Scotland, Celtic art can be found on objects associated with the Church, including manuscripts.

The exhibition aims to introduce visitors to ancient Celtic art and the material culture of first-millennium BCE Europe, beyond Mediterranean shores. The peoples who inhabited central and western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman periods (c. 800 BCE–450 CE) left behind very few written records of their own, so the history of these populations has traditionally been told through the lens of their southern neighbors, the Greeks and Romans. Throughout classical antiquity, Greeks and Romans perceived these peoples—their frequent combatants—as “barbarians,” depicting them as noble but defeated in writing such as Julius Caesar’s Gallic War and through sculpture like the Dying Gaul. These tropes overshadowed the complexity and variety of Iron Age societies across Europe, and Celtic art and its apparent abstraction were often compared unfavorably to the naturalism of classical art by scholars until well into the 20th century. In the United States, popular views of Celtic art and culture tend to associate it with the medieval period in what is now Ireland and Scotland; here, the term “Celtic” perhaps most commonly conjures up images of knotwork designs, harp melodies, or a certain Boston NBA team.

Celtic Art Across the Ages was curated by Susanne Ebbinghaus, the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art and Head of the Division of Asian and Mediterranean Art, with Penny Coombe, the Kelekian Curatorial Fellow in Ancient Art, Laure Marest, the Damarete Associate Curator of Ancient Coins, and Matthew M.L. Rogan, Senior Curatorial Assistant for Special Exhibitions and Publications.

“We are very excited about this exhibition and invite visitors to come look beyond the world of the Greeks and Romans to discover the art and creativity of their northwestern neighbors,” said Susanne Ebbinghaus. “It feels long overdue.”

Ebbinghaus continued: “We are deeply grateful to the many European and American lenders whose generosity has made it possible for us to present a rich variety of Celtic art not typically seen in the United States. The majority of the objects have never before been on view in this country.”

The Installation

The exhibition comprises an introductory gallery, four thematic sections—on archaeology, art, encounters, and reception—and a reading room. In these spaces, visitors will discover a rich array of exquisitely decorated weaponry and armor, horse and chariot trappings, vessels, jewelry, and coins from the Iron Age to early medieval times (c. 800 BCE–1200 CE), see how imagery transformed under Roman rule, and trace the reception and revival of Celtic art in the modern era. From shape-shifting ancient ornaments to the more well-known interlace designs of medieval Ireland and Scotland, the objects in this exhibition reveal rich and complex artistic traditions that defy stereotypes of what constitutes Celtic art.

The introductory gallery contextualizes the concept of ancient Celtic art by presenting different definitions of the term “Celtic,” acknowledging the range of notions and identities that visitors will bring to the exhibition. Visitors are greeted in this space by an almost 2,500-year-old fragment of a head carved from sandstone, likely representing a warrior, found in Heidelberg, Germany (on loan from Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe). With its mix of figural and ornamental features, the statue fragment demonstrates key characteristics of what scholars have termed Celtic art.

The next gallery addresses what archaeology can—and cannot—tell us. On display here are grave goods from burials and finds from ritual sites of the first-millennium BCE Hallstatt and La Tène periods excavated in Austria, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Britain. The finds comprise both locally made and imported objects of bronze, gold, and other materials and include outstanding objects from select tombs, as well as a number of more complete tomb contexts. The latter introduce visitors to ancient individuals of different ages through the furnishings that accompanied their burials, such as personal ornaments, weapons, and vessels. Highlights include a group of large bronze vessels from graves (c. 800–500 BCE) at Hallstatt, Austria, that reveal the wealth of their owners through their luxe material as well as the time and skill needed to hammer the metal into shape and apply geometric and figural decorations (on loan from Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna); a collection of feasting wares from the Kleinaspergle burial mound in Asperg, Germany, that offer a glimpse of the multifaceted connections between western Europe and the Mediterranean region in the fifth century BCE (Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart); and a spectacular early sixth-century BCE bronze Greek serving container (hydria) with a handle that features a human figure flanked by animals, found in the Grächwil burial mound in Meikirch, Switzerland. The hydria provokes questions about the vessel’s journey from the Mediterranean area and what its owners thought of the figural scene on the handle, which includes lions (Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern).

At the heart of the exhibition is a section that features individual works of Celtic art from a period of over one and a half millennia, from roughly 800 BCE to 800 CE, from continental Europe as well as Britain and Ireland. Jewelry and functional objects like arms and armor, horse trappings, chariot components, and feasting equipment, as well as objects associated with the Church, show the use of elaborate ornament. This ornament could transform ordinary things into special ones appropriate for ceremonies and rituals, imbuing them with meaning, even power, and the ability to lend protection and prestige. The objects are linked by certain curvilinear motifs, but do not constitute a continuous, unified tradition. Highlights include a third-century BCE bronze pony cap featuring intricately engraved horns set into a base with repoussé designs that has holes for the pony’s ears, found in Torrs, Scotland (on loan from National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh); a cast bronze openwork roundel teeming with overlapping dragons and other creatures, found in a chariot grave discovered in 1999 during construction work for Charles de Gaulle airport in Roissy, France (Musée d’Archéologie nationale, Saint-Germain-en-Laye); the Blickling Psalter, an ornately illuminated book of psalms likely produced in the early eighth century CE in what is now southern Scotland, the only deluxe Insular manuscript housed in the United States (Morgan Library & Museum, New York); and an eighth-century CE sandstone double-sided cross slab with carvings found in a church at Monifieth, Scotland (National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh). A case displaying coins from the third through the first century BCE traces how Gallic peoples, in what is today France and Belgium, initially imitated imagery found on Greek coins, and then adapted the medium to their own needs and aesthetic interests.

“Celtic coins offer invaluable insight into the process of adoption of a medium imported from the Greeks and its adaptation to local practices, ideas, and imagery,” said Laure Marest. “After a brief period of imitation of foreign prototypes, Gallic peoples began producing coins celebrating their own aesthetics, myths, and messages. Their interest in abstraction, deconstruction, and geometric patterns appears modern in many ways and in fact fascinated Surrealist artists.”

The Encounters gallery presents artworks as case studies to reconsider moments of cultural clash and interaction. Some works project stereotypes of Celts/Gauls, such as a full-size 19th-century plaster cast of the “Dying Gaul” (on loan from Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, Connecticut), a trope in sculpture of a noble warrior lying in defeat. Cast from a Roman marble version of earlier Hellenistic statuary, the sculpture is juxtaposed here with a rare example of local self-representation in the form of second-century BCE limestone sculptural fragments found at a settlement in Entremont, France, including a warrior’s torso and head as well as a cluster of five decapitated human heads (Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence). Scholars still debate whether the stacked heads represent revered ancestors or war trophies. A display of coins illustrates the propagandistic divide between depictions of captive and disheveled Celts issued by Rome and images of local pride struck by Gallic leaders such as Vercingetorix. This section of the exhibition also addresses local interactions with Rome through adoption of classical approaches to image making, particularly the representation of local deities in human form, showing examples of statuettes of, among others, Cernunnos, Epona, and Sequana, as well as the Dea Artio, or bear goddess, depicted in a bronze sculpture featuring a seated woman and a large bear (Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern).

“This part of the exhibition explores a remarkable moment of cultural change in ancient France and the northwestern provinces of the Roman world,” said Penny Coombe. “Local deities, with names coming from Celtic languages, were portrayed in human form for the first time and honored with written dedications, a typically classical way of interacting with the gods. Different traditions were evolving together in new ways that must have resonated at this time, neither completely Gallic nor totally Roman.”

The final section of the exhibition, dedicated to the theme of reception, addresses more modern notions of Celts. In the early 18th century, scholars connected the modern languages of Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Scotland with what was known of the language of the ancient Celts mentioned by Greek and Roman authors. Written works of the period began to romanticize the Celts, such as James Macpherson’s Fingal (1762), which the author claimed was a translation of a Scottish Gaelic epic composed by the third-century bard Ossian. An early copy of Fingal (on loan from Harvard’s Houghton Library) is displayed near a watercolor (c. 1832–34) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres that depicts Ossian dreaming of heroes past. Evidence of the revival of Celtic ornament in the Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and beyond can be found in a striking wood harp (c. 1890) made by James McFall, an innovator of the instrument’s form, painted with ornate knotwork designs and fantastical creatures (loan from Rosemary Caine). An exquisite silver clasp for a liturgical cloak by Irish silversmith Mia Cranwill, made for St. Patrick’s Church in San Francisco in 1922, as the Irish War of Independence was ending, references gilded medieval metalwork and is inscribed on the reverse in Irish “For the Glory of God and the Honor of Ireland” (loan from National Museum of Ireland, Dublin). The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston has loaned the richly illuminated “Freedom of the City of Dublin” certificate presented to President Kennedy on June 28, 1963.

A gallery adjacent to the main sections of the exhibition serves as the Celtic Art Across the Ages reading room. Visitors may browse copies of the exhibition catalogue and take part in family-friendly, self-guided drawing and puzzle activities with prompts to explore, re-create, and reimagine various distinctive motifs found throughout the exhibition. Performances of Celtic music, dance, and readings will take place in this space during the run of the exhibition. See below for more information about related programs.