THE RENAISSANCE WITNESSED
an unending fascination of medals and numismatics, a phenomenon
closely related to the rise of collectionism and the love of
antiquities. A specialized literature, with some basic common
traits, was developed to impose order on a growing collection of
materials: manuals of collectionism, works that utilized coins
and medals to reconstruct certain aspects of history, and
treatises that studied the symbolic content of the pieces.
The medal shared certain
characteristics with other Renaissance and Baroque modes of
representation, especially the impresa, or device: a portrait,
on the one hand, and a motto, or a device combined with a
symbolic figure or scene, on the other, were capable of manifesting
an encoded desire to make oneself known. The motifs utilized
came from different sources, even from the world of
hieroglyphics. And these medals, in turn, inspired many emblems.
Therefore, the treatises dedicated to medals and numismatics, of
such great proliferation, contained complete catalogues and
images readily available to any artist.
Coins and medals were at the core of the Renaissance and Baroque
iconographic galaxy, a fact that makes this CD a unifying
nucleus of relationships with the other CDs produced by
Studiolum. The thousands of
images and descriptions that it contains form a true virtual
collection of medals: practically all that were known to the
man of the period, from the early work of Enea Vico to the
incredibly influential and spectacular book by the Spaniard
Antonio Agustín, with its luxurious sheets of engravings, or the
later treatise of Menestrier.
In preparation. |
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Titles included:
• Agustín, Antonio, Diálogos de las medallas (Madrid 1587;
Venice 1592 Italiano; Lucca, 1774 of the Opera Omnia, Hispano-Latin,
translated and with commentary by Andrea Schott S.J.)
• Camerarius, Joachim, Historiola rei nummariae (Tubinga
1539)
• Du Choul, Guillaume, Discours de la religion des anciens
romains (Lyon 1556 French; Lyon 1579 Spanish translation by B. Pérez del
Castillo)
• Erizzo, Sebastiano, Discorso sopra le medaglie antiche
(Venice 1559, 1568 and 1571)
• Freher, Marquard, De numismate census ... in quaestionem
vocato (Heidelberg 1599)
• Freher, Marquard, De re monetaria veterum Romenorum, et
hodierni apud Germanos imperii (London 1605)
• Gorlaeus, Abraham, Thesaurus numismatum Romenorum
(Amsterdam 1608)
• Strada, Jacobus, Imperatorum Romenorum imagines ... ex antiquis numismatibus ... (Zurich 1559)
• Landi, Costanzo, Miscellanea explicationes (Lyon 1560)
• Lastanosa, Vincencio Juan de, Museo de las medallas desconocidas
españolas, Huesca 1645
• Le Pois, Antoine, Discours sur les medailles (1579)
• Menestrier, Claude François, Science des medailles (Lyon
1694)
• Occo, Adolf, Imperatorum romanorum numismata (1579)
• Orsini, Fulvio, Imagines virorum illustrium (Rome 1570)
• Orsini, Fulvio, Familiae Romenae (Rome 1577;
second edition Paris, 1663, with commentary by Charles Patin)
• Roville, Guillaume, Primera [y segunda] parte del
Promptuario de las medallas de todos los mas insignes varones (Lyon
1561, Spanish translation by Juan Martín Cordero)
• Vico, Enea, Le imagini (1548 Italian; 1554
Latin)
• Vico, Enea, Discorsi sopra le medaglie (1555)
• Waserus, Caspar, De antiquis nummis Hebraeorum (Zurich
1605) |