As if by magnetic affinity, classical books and ancient coins gravitated toward one another in the studios of Renaissance humanists. Beginning in Italy in the fourteenth century this symbiosis was expressed by painted images of Roman coins in the margins and initials of historical texts, especially the Twelve Caesars of Suetonius and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, showing portraits of the emperors whose heroic deeds and vices were described by the writers. Daniela Gionta's Iconografia erodianea is a detailed analysis of one of the numismatically illustrated manuscripts of the Quattrocento, a lavish parchment volume of Herodian's History, translated into Latin by Angelo Poliziano of Florence and presented as a gift by him to Pope Innocent VIII in 1487. Poliziano's generosity was not motivated by piety but formed part of the political maneuvering of his patron, Lorenzo de' Medici, who was anxious to establish an alliance with the papacy. This literary gift, and no doubt more substantial ones of heavier material, proved their worth when Lorenzo secured a cardinal's hat for his thirteen-year-old son Giovanni (later Pope Leo X).
A Greek-speaking provincial from Antioch, Herodian may have held some minor office in the imperial palace in Rome in the early third century. His History is divided into eight books covering the period from the death of Marcus Aurelius (180 ce) to the beginning of the reign of Gordian III (238 ce). Though often dismissed as moralistic and superficial by historiographers today, Herodian's book generated some excitement when it was rediscovered by Italian humanists in the fifteenth century, along with other ancient Greek texts carried to the West by refugee scholars from Constantinople.
Poliziano's Latin translation was penned in a graceful humanistic hand by the scribe Neri di Rinuccini and illuminated with initials and marginal decorations by Attavante degli Attavanti, one of the most prolific and celebrated miniaturists of the late Quattrocento, judging from the number of works he produced for Lorenzo and other Florentine and foreign notables. For the Herodian, Attavante designed a frontispiece depicting gold medallions of Marcus Aurelius and his family (Faustina, Commodus, Verus). Each of the other seven books of the History begins with an elegant initial letter adorned with one or two coins of the principal emperor recorded in that section: Pertinax for book 2, Septimius Severus for book 3, and so on.
After an initial account of the history of the manuscript and the attribution of the miniatures to Attavante, Gionta discusses Poliziano's keen interest in ancient coins as demonstrated by many allusions to these small antiquities in his Miscellanea of 1489, such as an interpretation of the image of the liberty cap and daggers found on coins of Marcus Brutus. Poliziano notes that he has seen some of these medals in the collection of Lorenzo, indicating his familiarity with and access to the Medici family antiquities. Gionta ends her essay with a catalogue describing and identifying the eleven imperial coins copied by Attavante in the Herodian.
A minor weakness of Gionta's book results from her conviction that the coins depicted in the manuscript, like those that Poliziano saw while writing the Miscellanea, belonged to Lorenzo's cabinet, and were selected and made available to Attavante by Poliziano for use as models. Consequently she attempts to match each of the painted coins with actual pieces in the monetiere of the Archeological Museum of Florence, as recorded in the catalogue compiled by the museum's numismatist Migliarini in 1852. Since the monetiere had its origin in the Medici ducal cabinet, it seems plausible that a coin of Pertinax or Gordian recorded by Migliarini might be the very same piece owned by Lorenzo 400 years earlier, and illustrated in Poliziano's Herodian. The methodological pitfalls of this approach are legion. The current Florence monetiere can boast a history going back to the reign of Duke Cosimo I (1537–74), but it is not reasonable to suppose that Cosimo's coins included the same ones owned by Lorenzo il Magnifico. The antiquities of Lorenzo, inherited by his son Piero, were dispersed to the four winds when the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1494 and their palace looted by Savonarola's mob.
Moreover, I am not convinced that the coins employed by Attavante in 1487 must necessarily have come from Lorenzo's cabinet. Most of the coins identified by Gionta are widely available in the antiquarian marketplace. For example the medal of Maximinus that introduces book 7, showing Salus, goddess of health, feeding a serpent, occurs in several denominations of bronze for that emperor, all labeled “common” by Henry Cohen in his checklist of Roman Imperial coins. There is no reason not to believe that the prosperous Attavante, whose interest in antiquities is evident in other commissions inspired by coins, sarcophagi, cameos, and the like, might have used his own collection of medaglie for the numismatic images in the Herodian, following the practice of contemporaries like Ghirlandaio and Mantegna.
Gionta's book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on Renaissance coin collecting with a detailed survey of the numismatic activity of Poliziano and Lorenzo de' Medici. The colored plates of the manuscript illuminations and of the Roman coins that inspired them are very handsome, and there is a useful preface by Fiorenzo Catalli, director of the Florence monetiere, on the history of that collection.
