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Celtic Knot
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Celtic Knot :
This website provides you a good collection of celtic knot pictures. Celtic knots were carved into the rocks by an unknown race of megalith builders thousands of years before the Celtic culture arrived. Celtic knotwork is found in many celtic designs and pictures, jewellery, clip arts.
- Celtic Knot Meaning :
There are many modern 'politically correct' problems surrounding exactly what is Celtic and what is not. The most common error is to talk of 'Celtic knotwork', that complicated and elaborate interlacing of lines, curves and geometric shapes which seems to be appearing everywhere nowadays. This style of design and decoration was in fact brought to Britain in the 6th century AD by Saxon Christian monks and was used exclusively to illuminate the hand-written Christian Gospels. The Saxon people used some of the art for personal decoration.
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- Celtic Knotwork :
In Pre-Celtic Britain, there are many ancient places that were elaborately and painstakingly decorated and carved with many different styles of celtic knotwork which contain spiral, zigzag, diamond, line and curve but nowhere do these separate symbols and designs overlap or interlace and nowhere is there to be found an example of knotwork. It should also be noted that these elaborate designs and symbols are not Celtic either. They were carved into the rocks by an unknown race of megalith builders thousands of years before the Celtic culture arrived.
Interlace borders and panels are based upon the plaiting art of the Chinese as far back as a few thousand years BC Most peoples surrounding the Mediterranean, the Black and Caspian Seas. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Moors, Persians, Turks, Arabs, Syrians, Hebrews, and North African tribes have also used this form in one way or another on stone, metal and wood.
The only interlaced- work in Egyptian, Greek and Roman decorative art is the plait it was never modified. Derek Bryce in his book Symbolism of the Cross suggests that the breaks may have been included in order to imitate nature, which like a flower may look perfection from a distance but close inspection reveals that no one petal is the same.
- Celtic Knot Art :
In the chronology of the Celtic ornamental symbols the knotwork design though to many the essence of Celtic art was actually the last to make an appearance. Scholars believe that the first cross-slabs to appear with multi-strand interlacing date from around the seventh century AD in Scotland and Ireland, the most famous of them being from Cardonagh and Fahan Mura. Through the centuries the Celtic crosses and stone slabs became decorated with very complex interlaced patterns and other equally intricate decoration and were painted with bright colours.
The earliest knotwork on stone slabs, metalwork and MSS. followed the rules of a continuous ribbon of knot, in later MSS. the continuity was not insisted upon. In the middle of the seventh century AD the first interlacing appears in insular book decoration on the colophon page at the end of St Matthew's Gospel in a fragment of the Durham Gospels. This page has an unusual shape of three Ds, one on top of the other. The ability of the knotwork to expand or contract, like liquid filling a designated passage by adapting itself through necessary change in its pattern, made it a useful decorative tool for the Celtic scribe, whose skill gave it new dimensions of intricacy.
Celtic interlace lasted longer through the centuries than any other style by the illuminator and was invariably the decoration which would be chosen rather than spiral, .key patterns and zoomorphics if it was to be used by itself to decorate large areas of vellum and stone.
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