Ancient coins played a central role in Renaissance experiences of the classical past. They were by far the most commonly encountered material remains of antiquity, and as Johannes Helmrath shows in his contribution to this collection, they inspired a wide range of responses. These offer considerable challenges to anyone working on coins’ reception: they were presented as gifts and collected, copied and adapted, and studied and discussed. The twenty-four papers in this volume provide a sparkling showcase of how scholars from a variety of fields are approaching these challenges; the thematic and chronological scope of the contributors’ work, covering responses to Greek as well as Roman coins, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, is very much more extensive than the book’s title would suggest.
From the case studies, several major themes emerge. A passion for coins gripped people across Europe. It affected princely collectors and prominent ecclesiastical figures — John Cunnally identifies a manuscript detailing the collection of the Venetian Andrea Loredan, and François de Callatay documents the holdings of the Low Countries churchman Laevinus Torrentius — but also lowlier members of society, as Ursula Kampmann shows in a fascinating discussion of the numismatic correspondence between a Swiss Catholic and a reformed pastor.
Collectors could identify and interpret their coins with the help of a flood of treatises that appeared in the second half of the sixteenth century, which gathered together the coins of particular emperors or of particular types. Jonathan Kagan examines writers on Greek coins, and Patricia Serafin analyzes Pirro Ligorio’s discussions of examples from the reign of Nero. Ulrike Peter’s rich paper on Sebastiano Erizzo shows how he used different methods to interpret different coins: some offered moral exempla; some gave historical data; and some, perhaps the favorites of early modern numismatists, seemed to offer problems of symbolism that required the divination of learned erudites. Gian Franco Chiai very usefully classifies the three potential meanings of imagines verae, used by numismatic writers to describe portraits on their coins: they were truly works of art, accurate representations (Erizzo was interested in how coin portraits could reveal their subjects’ ages), and exemplary images to which new theories about physiognomy could be applied.
As collectors and scholars pored over the coins themselves, they also developed techniques of connoisseurship and stylistic analysis. Neela Struck shows how sixteenth-century numismatic books employed the principles of stylistic criticism, particularly for Roman coins, reviewing the contributions of Enea Vico, Erizzo, Antonio Agustín, and Antoine Le Pois. Ulrich Pfisterer works back from Chardin’s eighteenth-century parodies of the antiquary as monkey to look at what they suggest about critical responses to antiquarianism. He differentiates the more common attacks on antiquarianism for its fussy interest in details and dusty irrelevance from the more perceptive suspicion of its reliance, not on books, but on the evidence of the senses.
Artists responded to classical coins in a variety of ways. Several papers demonstrate how engravers and sculptors took ancient pieces as models for modern coins, for celebratory medals, and incorporated details from them in other media. Michail Chatzidakis, for example, shows how Cyriac of Ancona used a coin from Chios for his portrait of Homer; Andrew Burnett looks at the adaptations of ancient coins in fifteenth-century Italian buildings. Others look at the question of forgery, which remains a difficult phenomenon for contemporary scholars to decipher. Here Henning Wrede explicates Hubertus Goltzius’s thoughtful analysis of the uses to which coins can be put, next to Wilhelm Hollstein’s demonstration that 80 percent of the coins Goltzius illustrates in his 1566 Fasti et magistratuum et triumphorum Romanorum were made up. Federica Missere Fontana offers a bravura analysis of the problem, examining the terms in which sixteenth-century authors discussed imitation, invention, and deceit. She looks in particular at Giovanni Cavino and his collaboration with Alessandro Maggi da Bassano, one of the most prominent Paduan humanists and collectors of the period, documented in illustrations from MS 663 of the Biblioteca del Seminario Vescovile of Padua and in Cavino’s series of coins of the Roman emperors. She shows that they created coins that were similar, but not identical, to their models, in competition with the ancients. Numismatic writers admired Cavino, rather than disdaining him.
The papers derive from a 2011 conference in Berlin, and have been published gratifyingly quickly. With more time, authors might have been able to respond more to each other’s presentations: Marco Callegari makes some of the same points as Missere Fontana in his discussion of the Cavino manuscript, for example. The case-study format means that the authors tend to shy away from making wider contextual claims, as Pfisterer attempted in his Lysippus und seine Freunde (2008). But the immediacy and excitement of the presentations remain, and this volume is an excellent introduction to the ways in which scholars are examining the reception of ancient coins.
