Some fifteen years ago a session on the display of sculpture in the Renaissance was convened at the annual College Art Association meeting in New York. After my presentation, an audience member expressed her fascination that I considered medals as sculpture. Without missing a beat, Shelley Zuraw, one of the session chairs, stood up and quipped, “Well, what the hell else would they be?” Amen.

The study of Renaissance medals is a funny discipline. Even as medals typically fit into one’s palm, they do not fit conveniently within those canonical categories of painting, drawing, sculpture, or printmaking, and are often marginalized to the outskirts of scholarly investigation. Yet, it is precisely the intersections with those margins and the investigations of other disciplines that make medals scholarship valuable to a wide range of inquiries. The importance of the medals’ sitters and the invention and reuse of various symbols, allegories, phrases, personifications, inscriptions, and design solutions are often central to studies across the humanities.

Medals are commonly considered along with numismatics, but they are distinct from coins and they serve diverse purposes. Coins are issued in large numbers by a governing agency and have a determined, if fluctuating, value as official currency. Medals could be commissioned in any number, by anyone, on any subject, and they held no official value as a means of exchange beyond the value of their metal (gold, silver, bronze, lead) and the perceived social value of the person represented. Struck medals and coins share similar proportions and methods of manufacture (either striking or pressing), while cast medals are usually larger, thicker, and heavier, and their production runs are far smaller than their struck counterparts. Medals were buried in the foundations of buildings, hung from chains, worn on occasion, collected, displayed, distributed as gifts and rewards, interred with the deceased, and used as propaganda. Adding to the confusion, the Renaissance use of the term medaglie, as Reference McCroryMartha McCrory and others have shown, included ancient coins and contemporaneous medals in Renaissance inventories. The inventory and study of medals are also included with discussions on decorative arts, including plaquettes, paxes, gold- and silverwork, small bronzes, mortars, inkstands, and bells.

The medal was a Renaissance invention. Its form was borrowed obliquely from the Roman coins and medallions plowed up in fields and sold at local markets in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but the function was completely new. The earliest medallic prototypes include the Constantine and Heracleus medals from the late fourteenth century, the Carrara medals from the 1390s, and the Sesto medals from the 1420s in Venice, but none truly anticipated the impact of Pisanello’s medal of the penultimate Byzantine emperor, John XIII Paleologus, and his retinue’s arrival in Ferrara (then Florence) for the ecumenical council in 1438/39. The precise conditions of that initial medal’s manufacture are still unknown, but the popularity of the new art form was immediate throughout Italy in the decades that followed, with centers for medal production emerging in Rome, Mantua, Bologna, Venice, Ferrara, Naples, and Florence. Medals became similarly popular in Germany and Northern Europe in the sixteenth century, particularly in the cities of Augsburg and Nuremburg. Thousands of medals were cast or struck throughout Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their popularity continued to grow in the centuries that followed.

While the last quarter century of scholarship on medals has proven remarkably fertile, one is reminded of the groundbreaking work from a century or so earlier. A series of Continental scholars, including Reference ArmandArmand, Reference HeissHeiss, Reference BabelonBabelon, Reference FovilleDe Foville, Reference ForrerForrer, Reference FabriczyFabriczy, Reference FriedländerFriedländer, and Reference HabichHabich, organized Renaissance medals into those groups that would come to standardize the field. That period of diligent erudition culminated in Sir George Francis Hill’s Corpus of Italian Medals (Reference Hill1930) and Georg Habich’s Die deutschen Schaumünzen (Reference Habich1929–34). Those works set the standard in medals scholarship by categorically organizing the objects chronologically by regions and artists (and collating and codifying the work of earlier scholars) with the keen eye of a connoisseur and the assiduous evidentiary support of an archivist. James Draper wryly confided to me that Hill’s Corpus was at once the best and worst thing to happen to Renaissance medals. In that assessment he was undoubtedly correct, and the same can be said for Habich. Those works were so definitive, so overwhelmingly comprehensive, that they effectively shelved further investigation for the next half century. Corrections and additions were few. Although Hill published widely on coins and medals, he was especially enamored of fifteenth-century Italian medals; in his assessment, cast medals were superior to struck medals, and those of the fifteenth century were largely superior to those of the following century in content, style, conception, and grace. Such was Hill’s authority that his judgments were not substantively challenged. Because of the nature and timing of the emergence of medals in Northern Europe, such distinctions were not a focus for Habich. Scholarship on French medals lagged behind that of Germany and Italy, and, not surprisingly, it tended to focus on the medallic campaigns of Louis XIV. With notable exceptions, such as Guillaume Dupré, France boasted few noteworthy indigenous medallists until the seventeenth century.

In addition to the publication of multivolume catalogues of important collections and monographs on artists, families, locations, or periods, the study of Renaissance medals has benefited from dedicated journals and intermittent essay collections. This overview is by no means comprehensive. With few exceptions (for example, the work of Weiss and Middeldorf), the level of scholarship on Renaissance medals flagged between the mid-1930s and the later 1960s. That interval ceased beginning in 1967: the publication, edited by George Hill and Graham Pollard, of the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, opened the floodgates (essentially a repackaged publication of Hill’s work on the Dreyfus collection from 1933, and an update to the checklist published by Perry Cott in Reference Cott1951). Publication of the stunning Ciechanowiecki collection, Jacques Fischer and Gay Seagrim’s Reference Fischer and Seagrim Sculpture in Miniature , followed two years later, as did the Salton Collection of Renaissance and Baroque Medals and Plaquettes . In the 1970s and 1980s, several catalogues on Renaissance medals collections were published: the Molinari Collection at Bowdoin College by Andrea Norris and Ingrid Weber (Reference Norris and Weber1976); the Vernon Hall Collection at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1978); and a private collection in Milan by Middeldorf and Stiebral (Reference Middeldorf and Stiebral1983). Notably, these collections were not specific to any particular country or region, and the first two extended well into the eighteenth century. In 1977, the Monnaie de Paris issued the first of its series on French medals, Catalogue général illustré des éditions de la Monnaie de Paris, with the first volume covering antiquity to Louis XVI. In the 1980s, Mark Jones published two volumes on the French medals in the British Museum, excellent supplements to the studies by Reference RondotRondot, Reference MazerolleMazerolle, and Reference JacquiotJacquiot. Those catalogues were joined by the revised republication of important surveys: the reissue of Hill’s Medals of the Renaissance (Reference Hill1978; originally 1925) and the expanded reissue of Hill’s Corpus (Reference Hill1984). Jones also wrote the survey, The Art of the Medal (Reference Jones1979), which remains an excellent and accessible introduction to the entire field.

In Reference Whitman and Varriano1983, Nathan Whitman and John Varriano curated and published a valuable overview of papal medals from the Baroque period: Roma Resurgens. Graham Pollard’s publication of the expansive collection at the Museo del Bargello in Florence, Medaglie italiane del Rinascimento, largely written by Reference Middeldorf and GoetzUlrich Middeldorf and published after his death in 1983, spanned three volumes between Reference Pollard1984 and 1985. It is a rather strange publication, written in English and Italian, and illustrated with odd enlargements and details, but it disseminated to the public one of the most important public collections of Italian medals. In Reference Vannel and Toderi1987 Fiorenza Vannel and Giuseppe Toderi’s La medaglia barocca in Toscana laid the structure for understanding many of the Italian medals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the same year, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, published the proceedings of a symposium, edited by Pollard, on Italian medals. That volume brought together an exceptional panel of international scholars, and it was the first book-length topical treatment on Renaissance medals by multiple authors in at least half a century—perhaps the first ever. The field would have benefited enormously from a similar symposium and publication on transalpine medals. The early 1990s saw the publication of several important collections, including the massive civic collection of Italian medals in Milan, for example, by Johnson and Martini in Reference Johnson and Martini1986; the Stabilimento Johnson Collection in three volumes, by Reference JohnsonCesare Johnson; and Marjorie Trusted’s inventory of German medals in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The latter was, to my knowledge, the first scholarly volume on German medals in English.

The most important publication on Renaissance medals in the last quarter century, and the one that has received the most attention, is The Currency of Fame (Reference Scher1994). Edited by Stephen K. Scher, this sumptuous volume brought Renaissance medals to center stage as it supported important exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Frick Collection in New York City; and the Edinburgh Museum of Art, Scotland. The team of international scholars assembled to write that catalogue represented a broad range of those working in the discipline, from museum curators and independent scholars to academics across North America and Europe. Some authors have left the field for other pastures, but the volume remains an authoritative survey of the field, and a quarter century later it is a valuable barometer for medals as a discipline. In terms of the public exposure Renaissance medals gained, The Currency of Fame is quite likely the most important publication on the subject ever produced. Perspectives on the Renaissance Medal (Reference Scher2000), a supplemental volume of essays published by the American Numismatic Society also edited by Scher, followed The Currency of Fame catalogue and a pair of scholarly symposia in New York City and Edinburgh (both in 1994). Similar to the volume on Italian medals published by the National Gallery of Art, Perspectives examined Renaissance medals thematically by an international panel of scholars. Of related interest was Designs on Posterity (Reference Jones1994), edited by Jones, the result of the FIDEM (Fédération Internationale de la Médaille d’Art) conference in London in 1992. While that publication did not restrict its focus to the Renaissance, nearly half its papers concerned objects before the eighteenth century.

If the publication of the Kress Collection in 1967 woke medals scholarship from its midcentury slumber, The Currency of Fame was the inspirational catalyst for the next generation. Later in the same decade the Italian medals in Berlin were published, although not all were illustrated, by Lore Börner, and Piero Voltolina released a massive three-volume opus on Venice’s medals, La storia di Venezia attraverso le medaglie (Reference Voltolina1998). In a similar vein, Le medaglie dei Gonzaga (2000) by Reference Rossi, de Caro and GiovettiRossi, de Caro, Giovetti, et al., focused exclusively on that extended family up to the eighteenth century. Not to be overlooked, John Cunnally has been the leading force in examining numismatic literature of the Renaissance; his Images of the Illustrious (Reference Cunnally1999) is a superb overview.

The first decade of the twenty-first century showed no diminution of interest in the subject. In Reference Toderi and Vannel2000 Toderi and Vannel published a three-volume examination of sixteenth-century Italian medals. With some 2,800 entries, this was to be a complete treatment of the subject, even though the entries were sparse and did not include papal medals or those after the antique by medallists such as Cavino. Philip Attwood’s two volumes on Italian Medals c. 1530–1600 in British Public Collections (Reference Attwood2003), however, set the benchmark for the treatment of Italian medals in the decades after Cellini in spite of its implicit limitations. Attwood’s rigorous assessment of the topic establishes it as the critical resource on medals of that period and region. In Reference Pollard2007 the collection of Renaissance medals at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, was published posthumously by Graham Pollard in two hefty volumes. That publication updated the 1967 work by Hill and Pollard to include new acquisitions, better reproductions, and, in some cases, contemporary scholarship. The Middeldorf Collection at the Indiana University Art Museum (Reference Flaten2012) by Flaten provided a view into the collecting habits of an erudite scholar over the course of almost half a century, and the catalogue of European Medals in the Chazen Museum of Art (Reference Saffiotti Dale2014), edited by Maria Saffioti Dale, brilliantly replaced the problematic Vernon Hall Collection catalogue from forty years earlier. The Chazen catalogue is not comprehensive (only fifty were chosen), but the value of this methodology is manifest in the extensive attention given to each object.

In 2013 the most handsome and exciting book on German medals in decades was published, Reference Cupperi, Martin Hirsch and Pfisterer Wettstreit in Erz , edited by Walter Cupperi, Martin Hirsch, Annette Kranz, and Ulrich Pfisterer. More than an exhibition catalogue, it combined authoritative essays on individual objects with topical discussions, material analyses, and an extensive array of supporting materials, including books, prints, furniture, majolica, miniatures, small bronzes, paintings, and myriad forms of visual evidence. That publication was followed by a conference the following year in Munich, the proceedings of which appeared in the journal Numismatische Zeitschrift in 2017.

The catalogue of the Steven K. Scher collection, due in 2018 through the American Numismatic Society and the Frick Collection in New York, promises to be among the most important publications on Renaissance medals in over a century. The collection of some one thousand medals, including unique specimens and examples in precious metals and related ephemera (wood, wax, and terra-cotta models), is perhaps the finest private collection in the world, and the catalogue will be written by scholars from Europe and North America, including Scher. Like the Middeldorf collection, the Scher collection puts a lens to the collecting priorities of an esteemed scholar. Unlike any publication in recent history, it has the distinction of documenting what are, in many instances, the finest examples in existence.

The publications on Renaissance medals mentioned above have not included the myriad auction catalogues, published with some degree of regularity in North America and throughout Europe, from Spink, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Morton and Eden, Asta, and others, over the past few decades. Auction catalogues can be a wealth of information, but their value is not what it once was, especially for smaller objects such as medals that are relatively affordable. As with any number of collectibles, the internet has changed the auction world radically. Online auctions from reputable houses are common, and larger commercial sites, such as eBay, have made objects from Pisanello and Soldani to Warin and Roty available worldwide. Alas, online auctions rarely have catalogues and few provide a verifiable provenance. Caveat emptor!

The past decade or so has seen several panels on Renaissance medals and coins at the Renaissance Society of America annual conference, in some instances running four sessions. Those meetings resulted in two special issues of The Medal (British Museum Press, 2010, 2015). The most rewarding aspect of those sessions was the range of academic disciplines represented: English literature, comparative literature, religion, history, art history, Italian studies, women’s studies, critical theory, and design studies, to name only a few. The interdisciplinary nature of medals scholarship is also evident in the diversity of journals in which medals research is published. In addition to the expected numismatic journals in the US and Europe, important research over the past twenty-five years that places Renaissance medals at the center of scholarly inquiry has been featured in Anthropology and Aesthetics, Journal of Design History, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, Sixteenth Century Journal, Woman’s Art Journal, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Master Drawings, Artibus et Historiae, Burlington Magazine, and of course Renaissance Quarterly, among others. This is where the die hits the flan, metaphorically: interesting scholarship on medals often happens outside of collection catalogues, auction catalogues, and numismatic journals. Scholars from varied disciplines discover that a medal or a group of medals or artists anticipate, support, or respond to nagging questions they pose, and they uncover new ways of understanding the objects. For those who have spent substantial portions of careers looking at medals, it is exciting when scholars bring diverse approaches to the table: different training, assumptions, paradigms, and templates, and different ways of assessing the object, its production, patronage, collection, function, dissemination, and historiography.

Where is medals scholarship heading in the next quarter century? What fields are left to plow? One must always assume that archival work has the potential to unearth new discoveries, and that new medals (or variations) will surface from time to time. Areas that intersect with other media and disciplines will continue to inform our initial assumptions and affect our conclusions; our collective focus will expand beyond the binary template of Italy and Germany. Methodologies informed by collaborative digital humanities projects worldwide will mesh seamlessly with traditional studies of personalities, iconographies, and emblemata.

I am confident that archives throughout Europe are still replete with unpublished gems, from tax records and notarial jottings to personal correspondences. On a recent research excursion in North America I uncovered several unpublished, handwritten notices directly related to celebrated medalists and to the circumstances surrounding the facture of specific medals. Other projects and duties have hindered my publication on them, but I am certain that a great number of revelatory items survive in civic archives throughout Europe. Beyond archival work, where will the discipline look? The infusion of research in other areas will be key. For example, one area that has received little attention is the role medals played in the development, design, and creation of type and fonts in the fifteenth century for the printed book. The industry that emerged in the wake of the printing press was closely related to medals design, and both areas were deeply concerned with similar issues. Most early type designers were trained as goldsmiths and many, including Nicolas Jenson, had worked as die cutters at mints. Early medallists were searching for, or inventing, appropriate fonts for inscriptions—Gothic, sans serif, quasi-Roman—before Trajanic capitals became the dominant aesthetic for medals (and books) in the 1480s. Early publishers and typesetters, such as Conrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz at Subiaco, Johannes and Wendelin de Spira in Venice, and, most famously, Jenson, struggled to design and fabricate fonts in the 1460s, 1470s, and 1480s that would resonate with the public, that were economically feasible, and that were consistent with the subject matter (i.e., an appropriate Latin font for Latin texts, etc.).

And while much of twentieth-century medals scholarship focused on medals from either Italy or Germany (with tertiary energies spent on French medals), scholarship is only beginning to categorically examine medals from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, and elsewhere. New Renaissance medals continue to surface, though not with the frequency they did a century ago. The publication of collections in Paris, London, Berlin, Florence, Milan, Washington, DC, and elsewhere erroneously implies that our work is largely complete. Smaller civic collections and auctions continue to reveal new objects or unknown examples, and any number of universities in Europe and the United States have unpublished (and even uncatalogued) collections, including my home institution. Some enormous public collections, such as those in Vienna, have yet to be published comprehensively.

If we are living in a digital information age, that paradigm shift has not had a dramatic effect on basic medals scholarship itself. The tools that play pivotal roles in our understanding of other areas of art history and the humanities more broadly (dendrochronology, infrared reflectography, text mining, three-dimensional visualization, etc.) have influenced the conversation on medals minimally (with perhaps the exception of X-ray fluorescent analysis). Even so, the digital age has facilitated research immeasurably by posting various resources online, including some archives and several key catalogues and auctions, e.g., the Lanna Sale (1911; catalogued in Medaillen und Münzen), Domanig (Reference Domanig1907), Löbbecke (Reference Löbbecke1908), and the Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Reference Hill and Pollard1967; catalogued by Reference PollardPollard). FIDEM has all of their archived intermittent proceedings online and largely free of charge (issues of their journal Médaille since 2010 are available for sale), and under the auspices of the Ministero dei beni e delle attivita culturali e del turismo, the journal Bolletino di Numismatica is now available completely online. Google Books and integrated interlibrary loan programs have similarly made the research world a smaller place for all disciplines, as have discipline-specific online chat groups. Yet it is curious that in 2018 there exists no plan, to my knowledge, to build a comprehensive database for medals of the Renaissance (or any other period). Such a database would be free, open access, and associated with a stable (perhaps academic) URL, and it would be posted on WorldCat. Essentially a queriable content-management system like those at museums and libraries worldwide, the site would compile the information from all publications, from major surveys and catalogues (Hill, Reference HabichHabich, Currency of Fame, etc.) to thematic articles, across disciplines, and with links to full articles either on a subscription-based server such as JStor or as purchasable pdf files. Illustrations would be uploaded for all known examples, and any new discoveries related to a medal, medalist, sitter, subject, or inscription would be linked. The site would be updated regularly (monthly? annually?). Such a project would take several years, intrepid coding, a dedicated staff, and substantial financial support at the beginning, but the maintenance thereafter would be rather minimal. It could, in fact, function like a limited access wiki platform. Such a database would necessitate an imposing, but not insurmountable, number of legal arrangements and memoranda of understandings between civic agencies, private collections, publishers, and academic institutions. But if, in fact, medals are increasingly relevant to research in a broad swath of the humanities and social sciences, then the value is apparent and such a database already is overdue.

In addition to curatorial work on coins and medals cabinets across the world, the field is indebted to several organizations that have continued to support medals scholarship against adversity and through economic difficulties. Many of those societies focus on the promotion of modern and contemporary art medals or on numismatics, but they commonly sponsor conferences and publish proceedings that yield new research on Renaissance medals. FIDEM (and its resulting publication, Médaille) and the British Art Medal Society (and its journal The Medal) are perhaps the best known, but other organizations, such as the American Numismatic Society, host conferences and seminars that continue to provide essential training to the next generation of scholars.

Divided into twenty-five-year periods, a linear pattern of critically important publications emerges over the past half century: The Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Reference Hill and Pollard1967); The Currency of Fame exhibition and catalogue (Reference Scher1994); and the Steven K. Scher Collection (forthcoming in 2018). Since 1994, scholars such as Philip Atwood, Luke Syson, Steven Scher, Hermann Maué, Reference JonesMark Jones, the late Graham Pollard, the late Karl Schultz, Alan Stahl, Louis Waldman, Giuseppe Toderi, Fiorenza Vannel, Reference TrustedMarjorie Trusted, Reference BörnerLore Börner, Reference JohnsonRidolpho Martini, Cesare Johnson, and Jeffery Chipps Smith have shaped and expanded the field in ways not seen for a century. They are joined more recently by the erudite contributions of Ulrich Pfisterer, Walter Cupperi, Martin Hirsch, Tanja Jones, and others; and the field continues to benefit from those whose diverse interests sometimes intersect with medaglie. It is worthwhile to note, within the larger argument about the value of medals to various disciplines, that Sir George Hill became director of the British Museum, and Sir Mark Jones was director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, both of whom were medals scholars before assuming such august appointments. It would seem that research on the Renaissance medal is alive and well.