Fake or Real?

Happily, I managed to avoid that.

As far as the coins and the artistic conventions of their respective eras go, one wonders what impression this and other designs left on the people who spent these. Did they find the designs appealing somehow? Surely they knew the depictions weren't realistic.

One also wonders, for example, how the Gallo-Belgic staters evolved (or rather devolved) from handsome classical Greek designs into abstract swirls and dots, and how what had been horses on the earlier Greek coins had become nearly unrecognizable jumbles of Picassoesque fragments by the time the Celtic tribes were done creating their imitations.

Which isn't to suggest that primitive coin designs don't have their own charm and merit. They do. I just wonder how hard the artists were trying, and which primitive quirks might've been deliberate rather than accidental.

 

Good point. It certainly makes one wonder.

I still can't help but compare the art on something like the Gundestrup cauldron and thinking it as being more "primitive" than something like the Laocoön Group or the Portland vase. But you're right- upon deeper consideration, it certainly does seem like the Celts and other cultures deliberately chose a more abstract style of art.