The carved pillar stones of late Iron Age and Gallo-Roman Gaul are among the most important surviving examples of monumental Celtic art, and they provide a unique insight into the religious beliefs and the visual culture of the continental Celtic world in the last centuries before and after the Roman conquest. The pillar stones, with their carved reliefs of deities, warriors, and symbolic figures, belong to the broader tradition of Celtic stone carving and high crosses that extended across the Celtic world, and they form an essential link in the chain that connects the Hallstatt and La Tène art styles of the Iron Age to the great high crosses of the early medieval period. They are part of the wider Celtic art and craftsmanship tradition, and they are closely related to the Celtic metalwork and jewelry and Celtic knotwork and symbolism of the same period.
The Setting of the Pillar Stones
The pillar stones of late Iron Age and Gallo-Roman Gaul were set up in religious sanctuaries, in public squares, and at major junctions of roads and rivers, where they would have been seen by large numbers of people. The most important sanctuaries, including the great fanum at Ribemont-sur-Ancre in Picardy, the sanctuary of the Tarvos Trigaranus at Paris, and the sanctuary of the Sequani at the source of the Seine, were major religious centres that attracted pilgrims and worshippers from a wide area, and the pillar stones were the most impressive surviving elements of these sanctuaries.
The pillar stones themselves are typically tall, four-sided columns of local stone, often sandstone or limestone, and they range in height from one to five metres. The stones were carved in low or medium relief, with the figures and symbols arranged in registers that ran around the four faces of the column. The carving was typically painted, with the original paint sometimes preserved in protected areas, and the original appearance of the stones was far more colourful than the bare stone of the surviving examples suggests.
The Pilier des Nautes
The most famous of the Gaulish pillar stones is the Pilier des Nautes, a four-sided Gallo-Roman pillar found in 1710 beneath the choir of Notre-Dame de Paris, on the Île de la Cité, the ancient Lutetia of the Parisii. The pillar, which dates from the early first century CE, is decorated with a series of carved reliefs showing a number of Celtic deities, including Cernunnos, the horned god of the underworld, who is shown seated in a cross-legged position, holding a torque and a sack of coins; Esus, a woodland god shown cutting a branch from a tree; Smertrios, a war god shown with a club and a torque; and the matronae, the mother goddesses shown seated with baskets of fruit on their laps.
The Pilier des Nautes important pieces of evidence for Celtic religion in the late Iron Age, and the deities depicted on it can be identified with both native Celtic gods and gods with Roman names, in the process of interpretatio that characterised the religious life of the early Roman province. The pillar also shows the survival of older Celtic iconographic conventions in the Roman provincial context, and the carved figures, with their elongated proportions, their angular poses, and their elaborate drapery, are clearly indebted to the older Celtic visual tradition even as they adopt the conventions of Roman relief sculpture.
The Pillar of Pfalzfeld and Related Monuments
The Pillar of Pfalzfeld, found in the Hunsrück region of Germany and now in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, is a tall four-sided sandstone pillar of the early first century CE, decorated with four male figures in low relief, including a warrior with a sword, a hunter, a figure with a lyre, and a fourth figure whose identity is debated. The pillar is a masterpiece of late Celtic and early Gallo-Roman sculpture, and the figures, with their angular, geometric treatment of the body and their elaborate detailing of the clothing and the attributes, are typical of the hybrid style of the period.
The Heiligenberg pillar, also from the Hunsrück, is a similar four-sided stone showing figures in similar combination, and the Caisse de Saint-Vigor in Normandy and the Bouchaud relief from Allier in central France are related examples that demonstrate the regional diversity of the continental Celtic pillar tradition. The geographical distribution of the pillar stones covers most of Gaul and the Rhineland, with the greatest concentration in the area of the Sequani, the Leuci, the Treveri, and the Parisii, the four peoples whose territory included the major sanctuaries of the region.
The Jupiter Columns of the Rhineland
A particularly important class of Gallo-Roman pillar stones is the Jupiter column, a tall, often four-sided pillar surmounted by an image of Jupiter or a related Celtic-Roman deity, decorated with reliefs of gods, personifications, and symbolic motifs drawn from both the classical and the Celtic repertoires. The Jupiter columns of the Rhineland and eastern Gaul are among the most distinctive monuments of Romano-Celtic sculpture, and the surviving examples, including the great columns of Mainz, Bonn, and Köln-Mülheim, give a vivid sense of the religious and artistic life of the Gallic provinces in the first and second centuries CE.
The Jupiter columns reflect the Romanisation of the Celtic world and the gradual assimilation of the Celtic gods to the Roman pantheon, but they also show the persistence of older Celtic iconographic conventions. The Celtic Jupiter is often shown with a thunderbolt, a wheel, or an eagle, all attributes of the Roman Jupiter, but he is also often shown with Celtic attributes, including a torque, a serpent, or a horned helmet, that mark him as a specifically Celtic deity. The combination of the Roman and the Celtic elements in the Jupiter columns striking features of Gallo-Roman religious art, and it shows the way in which the Celtic religious tradition was able to absorb and adapt to the new Roman world.
The Iconography of the Pillar Stones
The iconography of the Gaulish pillar stones is a complex blend of Celtic and classical elements, and the carved figures can be difficult to interpret. The Celtic deities are often shown in poses and with attributes borrowed from Roman religious art, but the underlying meaning of the figures is often Celtic. The seated cross-legged figure of Cernunnos on the Pilier des Nautes, for example, is shown in a pose well established in Celtic art, even though the figure is dressed in a Roman-style tunic and holds a Roman-style torque.
The pillar stones also include symbols and motifs that have older Celtic origins, including the spiral, the triskele, the plant-scroll, and the animal-form. These motifs, developed in the La Tène tradition and used in the metalwork of the warrior elite, were translated into stone in the pillar stones, and they formed a visual link between the older Celtic world and the new Roman provincial world. The pillar stones are not merely religious monuments but visual documents of the transition from the Celtic to the Gallo-Roman world.
The Survival of the Pillar Tradition
The pillar stone tradition of the late Iron Age and Gallo-Roman period did not come to an abrupt end with the consolidation of Roman rule in Gaul, and the production of religious pillars continued throughout the Gallo-Roman period and into the late Roman period. The Christianization of Gaul in the fourth and fifth centuries brought new subjects and new forms, but the older tradition of carved stone monuments continued in the form of Christian sarcophagi, inscribed altars, and the great carved fonts and shrines of the early medieval church.
The pillar stone tradition also had a long afterlife in the folk traditions of France and the Rhineland, where carved stone crosses, wayside shrines, and boundary stones continued to be made well into the present. The persistence of the carved stone monument in the religious life of the region striking continuities in the history of European art, and the Gaulish pillar stones are an essential part of the broader Celtic art and craftsmanship tradition.
Related Topics
- The Celtic stone carving and high crosses tradition of which the Gaulish pillar stones are among the earliest surviving examples.
- The Hallstatt and La Tène art styles that shaped the visual vocabulary of the pillar stones.
- The Celtic metalwork and jewelry tradition that influenced the iconography of the pillar stones.
- The Celtic knotwork and symbolism that appears in the carved ornament of the pillar stones.
- The broader Celtic art and craftsmanship tradition in which the pillar stones are major landmarks.