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Inventing the Celtic Cross – the social lives of monumental sculpture.

Inventing the Celtic Cross is a space to explore the agency of monuments. Celtic crosses are a common monument type, a familiar sight in Europe and North America. In the broadest terms, they are understood as Christian symbols but also signify more narrowly as emblems of Celtic, especially Irish or Scottish, identity.

For as ubiquitous as Celtic crosses are, comparatively little is known about the monuments. Most would agree that the form emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as part of the Celtic Revival. From 1880 on Celtic crosses proliferated in the graveyards of Ireland and Scotland and their North American diasporas but also in public squares and private estates. The form emerges in a period when art and industry were strongly linked.

The project understands the invention of Celtic crosses as a performative and social act involving a network of individuals and objects. Celtic crosses were ‘invented’ from the design elements of medieval crosses. Antiquarian scholarship and drawings of medieval monuments created a visualization of the past, a type of invention. Monument makers who manufactured the earliest Celtic crosses from c. 1860 creatively redeployed medieval designs among other ancient ornament, inventing a hybrid style that appealed to the eclectic tastes of Victorian patrons.

This study focuses on the visual discourses of Celtic crosses as embedded in the dual contexts of nineteenth-century national landscape painting and the Victorian engagement with medieval art. Design and visual rhetoric reflect the negotiation and reconstitution of identity which informs all Celtic cross monuments founded in the conflicted historical narratives into a singular monumental past.

About project researcher, Colleen Thomas.