Plastic style and style of beautiful swords

In this already more mass production has found the use of plastic style, which was especially widespread in the 2nd century. Instead of two-dimensional ornament appeared three-dimensional, relief, often supplemented by fine engraving. Its appearance dates back to an earlier period, but since the end of the 3rd century, it reaches its climax in the strongly dismembered bracelets with S-shaped and snail-shaped plastic jewelry and foot bracelets, consisting of separate hemispheres (Table XXIX-XXX), sometimes almost baroque, in various rosette and palmetto-shaped bracelets, circles with imitation filigree jewelry, plastic dismembered hryvnia and fibula. Several workshops in Bohemia and Moravia produced brilliant examples of this foundry art. In the Carpathian Basin, this type of jewellery is less common. Raw materials were mainly bronze, later iron, the products of which in the form of fibulas or bracelets first reached a high artistic level during this period. In the West, this style manifests itself not only in bronze jewelry, but also in the brilliant works of jewelers, overflowing with snail-shaped and other plastic motifs (such as bracelets from the Oriliak Kantal). Such finds, however, are not so frequent. Around the same time, a style of “beautiful swords” appears, called so on the sheath, processed with great perfection and decorated with engraved or engraved patterns on the front side with animal and plant motifs, sometimes located diagonally. They are found from the Carpathian Basin to the west to Switzerland itself, where we meet them in Latina at the turn of the 2nd and last century. Consequently, in the later Latenian period, especially in the West Celtic continental region, there is a noticeable decline in local artistic activity, a certain impoverishment, if we consider development in terms of the initial scale in the early and late Latenian period. Only in some places did art workshops producing high quality items decorated with grains and filigree jewellery (Re-Geli in Hungary), late mask-shaped jewellery such as the Little Meržice Brno (Table XXIII) or artistically executed cult woks and other items of a cult nature remain. However, the production of more affordable items was predominant. The creative spirit manifested itself partly in the Celtic coin business.