Renaissance Coins and Medals

Among the early medals made by Pisanello (Antonio Pisano, c. 1395-c. 1455), considered as the "inventor of the modern medal", there are two of mercenary captains, Niccolò Piccinino and Francesco Sforza (the future duke of Milan). At the alleged moment of the medals' execution both condottieri were in the service of Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, who appears to have been the most probable commissioner. The pairing of these two captains was not coincidental-they were successors to the leaders of the two greatest Italian military companies, the bracceschi (led by Braccio da Montone) and the sforzeschi (of Muzio Attendolo Sforza), whose juxtaposition soon became a topos among contemporary chroniclers and biographers. The article outlines the political background of the commission and discusses the content and iconography of the two medals.

Vasari's biography of Bramante appears early in the Third Part of the Lives, the first to be devoted to an architect of the Modern Age. As a parallel to his treatment of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Vasari endowed his subject with consummate understanding and uncommon spiritual gifts. In providing the first codification of an individual who presented problems of interpretation in his own lifetime, Vasari drew on literary and visual sources of the period and then orchestrated them to underscore his particular interpretation. The themes he used to assemble his vision of Bramante included an association of the architect with Brunelleschi, study of the ancient ruins of Rome, and Bramante’s elevation to the office of the papal seal by Pope Julius II that required membership in the Cistercian order. Vasari’s woodcut portrait of Bramante as a monk that introduces the Life in the 1568 edition is an essential component of the larger message that promotes Bramante as a model of classical achievement and Christian spiritual attainment. Vasari found these very elements in Bramante’s own portrait medal and that they supplied him with the basic structure of his biography.

Les monnaies grecques ont de tout temps été considérées comme les plus belles monnaies jamais produites. Evoquant Goethe, José Maria de Hérédia ou le Président Theodore Roosevelt, cette conférence s’interroge sur les raisons qui fondent ce sentiment. On évoquera le très haut relief, la diversité des types, la qualité de la gravure et l’adaptation à la petitesse du format. On traitera également de la beauté (fondée sur la symétrie) et du sublime (fondé sur la dissymétrie), avec une attention particulière pour les types représentés de trois quarts face et pour l’évolution du goût du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours. Platon, Longin, Raphael, Rubens, Winckelmann, Kant, Burke et Ruskin sont quelques-uns des grands noms évoqués à cette occasion.

The famous "Seal of Nero, a Roman intaglio depicting Apollo, Marsyas and Olympus, was once in the collection of Lorenzo il Magnifico and is now in the National Museum of Naples. Two gems related to that "Seal of Nero" are published here for the first time: one, a severely damaged intaglio kept in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, is supposed to date from the third quarter of the first century BC. Another gem with a similar motif, a refined Renaissance cameo, recentlya ppeared in Oxfordshire and is now in a private collection in London. It is presumed that this perfectly preserved piece originally was in the possession of the Medici. The author considers a possible attribution of this work to the young Michelangelo Buonarroti and discusses a copy shown in a portrait painting by Botticelli now in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt on the Main. (summary by Matthias Barth)

This article proposes that Filarete's little-studied medals portraying Julius Caesar and Trajan were likely made in the 1430s, around the same time or even before Pisanello's medal of the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaeologus, traditionally considered the first Renaissance medal. I identify the ancient coins and reliefs on which Filarete based his designs and argue that Filarete may have collaborated with the famous antiquarian and humanist Ciriaco d'Ancona in producing the works. Finally, I argue that Filarete's emperor medals were conceived as exempla for contemporary princes and that the Caesar and Trajan medals may have been intended for John VIII Palaeologus and the Holy Roman emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg, respectively.

This contribution was first drafted as an introduction to a pair of linked sessions held at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston in spring 2016. It claims that fifteenth-century Naples remains an undervalued artistic center, especially when it comes to the city’s contribution to what art history has defined as 'Renaissance Art'. Quattrocento Naples’s artistic production is often considered 'Late Gothic' in style. If a relation to antiquity is undeniable, then this relation tends to be judged as impure or deficient. Such preconceptions hark back to Jacob Burckhardt’s moral condemnation of the Aragonese kings of Naples in his famous “Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien” (1860), a book that has long defined our conception of the Renaissance, and continues to do so – both scientifically and on a popular level. Burckhardt’s stylization of Federico da Montefeltro as the perfect Renaissance prince emerges in contrast to his negative characterization of the kings of Naples and to that of Alfonso of Aragon in particular. This article deconstructs Burckhardt’s narrative opposition and offers instead a more historically accurate account that demonstrates Federico’s political and economic dependence on the kings of Naples. I argue that this dependence was nothing but honorable to Federico da Montefeltro and is reflected in an image politics that draws heavily on Neapolitan models. The connection is analyzed by way of a case study that focuses on two medals, one by Cristoforo da Geremia and the second by Clemente da Urbino.

The Athens Numismatic Museum at a turning point, after the implementation of the permanent exhibition on the first floor of the Iliou Melathron (December 1998) and before the overall relocation of the Museum facilities to the historical building (March 2003).
The new acquisitions of the years 1994-2000; presentation of a selection of highlights from those acquisitions.

In its day, the portrait medal, with its exclusive value it possessed, became a modern instrument of communication avant la lettre. As a new medium of a communication in the Quattrocento, the portrait medal became a gift, accompanied by the intention on the part of the giver to gain recognition from the receiver. In the gift, both person and object are present.

The present article deals with the newly identified 15th-century testone of Bona of Savoy, Duchess of Milan, from the Emeryk Hutten-Czapski Collection owned by the National Museum in Krakow. Since the day the coin was referred to by the collector as a “medal of young Bona Sforza, queen of Polandˮ this – erroneous – attribution has never been changed. The present author investigates the history of the Krakow specimen and explores the possible reasons for the misinterpretation of the nature of this object. The author also focuses on the historical context and the political circumstances at the time of the issuing of the coin, as well as on the interpretation of its iconography. In the final part of the paper, the author makes a comparison between the testone from the National Museum in Krakow and other known specimens and types of the coin.

Portraits of important political and religious personalities are found on 16th-century Bohemian Renaissance relief stove tiles. This group of portrait stove tiles includes a small number of finds from Prague, Křivoklát Castle and Zvíkovec that represent a new iconographic motif, one that is connected with a commemorative coin, a commemorative medal by Hans Schwarz and a coloured woodcut from the workshop of Hans Sebald Beham. These served as sources for rendering an individual thought to be Augsburg burgher and merchant Jacob Fugger (1459-1525). The spread of the motif in the Czech lands is credited to the presence of Archduke Ferdinand II, the governor of Bohemia in 1548-1567, and his secret wife, Philippine Welser.

Collective memory quite often lies in the nexus where social beliefs can be interwoven with legitimacy claims advanced by authority, while ideology customarily emerges to provide symbolic models and suasive images through which power is justified. The image of Alexander the Great persisted long after his passing and was disseminated over a large area, especially with the assistance of the means of coinage. Even more, the figure of Alexander transcended the Hellenistic Age and continued to have a significant impact, haunting the metallic fields of coins and coin-shaped artefacts. The appeal of the great campaigner was employed on occasion to draw attention to cities as ‘lieux de mémoire’, to evoke identity pieces from a glorious past, as well as to flatter ambitions of Roman emperors. As Alexander was transformed after a fashion into a model of chivalry, his images travelled through time surviving into the Renaissance and beyond.
Building upon essays that take a broader approach, the present paper focuses on a few somehow neglected case studies, in an attempt to offer a more thorough analysis of the selected material. Such a case is constituted by coin issues of Smyrna with the representation of the local legend relating the ‘dream of Alexander’ (first emission appearing in the name of Marcus Aurelius; a couple more were minted just before the middle of the 3rd century AD). Another intriguing example is traced on ‘medallions’ of Abydos depicting the crossing of the Hellespont by Alexander; the query about the raison d’être of the initial appearance on an issue for Commodus as caesar leads to a rather revealing insight; quite interestingly this coin type was later re-used by Septimius Severus, Caracalla (as caesar), Severus Alexander and Maximinus Thrax.
The lasting impression made by the numismatic portrait of Alexander the Great moves to another level as the discussion comes to certain Renaissance medallions. The focus is turned particularly on the reputed meeting of Alexander with the Jewish High Priest, illustrated on medals produced for Pope Paul III by the engraver Alessandro Cesati (1545/46), a subject rich in connotations.

In 1532 Giovanni Maria Mosca, called Padovano, made a series of four medals for the Jagiellonian royal family. These are the medals of Sigismund I the Old, Queen Bona Sforza, princess Isabella and Sigismund II Augustus. The only complete, and original, group of casts is preserved in the Galleria Estense, Modena. Each of the medals bear a likeness of a member of the royal family on the obverse and an emblematic/allegorical composition on the reverse. The iconography of the Jagiellonian series proves that the artist realized a complex iconographic scheme devised by a still anonymous author, who belonged to the circle of the Krakow court. The reverse side of the young king’s medal shows a  figure of a striding lion in the center, with two surrounding inscriptions. In the article this medal is discussed in the context of Italian medallic production of the period, as well as the Jagiellonian propaganda system. In-depth analysis of the whole composition can lead to further conclusions in both artistic and political contexts.

The essay presents an analysis and interpretation, iconographic and iconological, of the medal of Camillo Agrippa (1585 ca.), represented on the obverse. Renowned for his engineering theories and works (debates on transporting the obelisk to Saint Peter’s square; the restoration of Aqua Vergine, the Villa Medici aqueduct), and for his treatises, the most famous of which is the Trattato di scientia d'arme (Rome 1553, Venice 1568), a beautifully illustrated treatise on fencing, he moved from Milan to Rome in1534.
The reconstruction of the biographical profile and intellectual activities of Camillo Agrippa, described as “sapiens architectus” in his funeral inscription, allows a better understanding of the meaning of his device on the reverse of the medal: a Minerva (not a warrior as it is currently assumed) grabs Fortuna with sail by her forelock.
An intentionally ambiguous motto is inscribed around it: Velis Nolisve(whether you wish it or not). By positioning it at a crucial junction in the montage of Plate 48 in his Mnemosyne Atlas, Aby Warburg underlined the relevance of this medal as a paradigmatic sign of Renaissance man who emancipates himself from medieval subjection to the wheel of Fate, and seizes his opportunity to govern the course of Fortuna.
Warburg's letters on this subject, preserved at the Warburg Archive in London, provide inspiring observations on the medal, and are vital to interpreting its significance, and also to re-establishing Warburg's crucial role as an active consultant and director of research at the Bibliothek Warburg even in the years of his hospitalisation at Kreuzlingen. Furthermore, we see that the figure of Fortuna accompanies Warburg until the last months of his life. Indeed, in a letter of 1929 to the economist Eric Seligman, Warburg proposed that he himself should hold a course on Fortuna at Columbia University, as he was making plans to export his new methodology of studying and researching overseas.

On April 26, 1478, the Pazzi family, supported by Pope Sixtus IV, attempted to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici during High Mass in the Florentine cathedral. Their designs to eradicate Medici power were largely unsuccessful - while Giuliano was murdered, Lorenzo survived and the aftermath of the conspiracy strengthened his position of dominance in the city. Shortly after, Lorenzo commissioned and distributed numerous copies of a commemorative medal depicting the attack, each side showing a portrait of one brother above a narrative depiction of their fate on that era-defining day. This paper will explore how Lorenzo appropriated the public image of his dead brother in this propagandistic venture. Using the medal as a case study, it will be shown that Lorenzo repeatedly invoked the memory of Giuliano to secure the consolidation of his own power.