Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance.

John Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiii + 230 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-691-01668-2.

Ancient coins were a ubiquitous element of Renaissance culture. By 1563, when Hubert Goltzius compiled his treatise on the coinage of Julius Caesar, he was able to cite the names of 978 individual coin collectors and numismatic scholars whom he had visited in two years of travel across the continent. In the book under review here, John Cunnally examines the development of numismatic books in the Renaissance and their intellectual and cultural significance. He does not attempt a systematic history of coin collecting and scholarship, a field to which he made an important contribution with his unpublished 1984 University of Pennsylvania dissertation, The Role of Greek and Roman Coins in the Art of the Italian Renaissance. Nor is this a technical bibliography of early numismatic publications, an area in which Christian Dekesel has made major advances, most recently with his Bibliotheca Nummaria: Bibliography of 16th Century Numismatic Books (London, 1997).

Though Petrarch and Alberti had promoted the collecting and contemplation of ancient coins as a path to the humanistic virtues of earlier ages, it was only with the publication of the Illustrium imagines in 1517 that numismatic objects became the primary focus of a book. This volume, published in Rome by Jacopo Mazzocchi and apparently compiled by Andrea Fulvio, features expressive and individualistic woodcut images of 205 ancient and medieval people, presented as coin obverses, though in many cases misidentified from actual coins (Trajan's portrait for Nerva) or completely invented (Cato; the medieval emperor Berengar). Each numismatic portrait is set at the top of an elaborate decorative framework containing a panel with a short biography of the subject. The format of an engraved portrait gallery of coin obverses was carried forth in such works as the 1553 Promptuaire des medailles of Guillaume Rouiile, in which 828 numismatic portraits (likewise often fanciful) illustrate biographies of individuals from A dam and Eve to Catherine de' Medici.

What we would consider more serious numismatic scholarship came with the publication of the Imagini con tutti i reversi of Enea Vico in 1548, an attempt to illustrate all known reverses as well as the portrait obverses of the coins of the first twelve Caesars. The basis for a modern understanding of Roman coinage came out of the famous debate in the 1550s between Vico and Sebastiano Erizzo over the nature of the large bronze sestertius issues, which differed so much from sixteenth-century coins that they were widely interpreted as having had purely commemorative rather than monetary function. Vico demonstrated that sestertii had been, in fact, circulating coins and made the argument that as physical emanations of ancient authority they were more direct and hence more reliable evidence for historical understanding than narrative sources. By the end of the sixteenth century, projects were initiated to publish all known ancient coins in systematic corpora, an undertaking that has yet to be fully realized.

In many ways, Images of the Illustrious reflects the nature of the book it describes. It is filled with intriguing information, perceptive observations, and illuminating illustrations, it is also written in a tone recalling witty dialogue more than academic prose (certainly not a fault) and with extensive excurses and an overall organization not always apparent to the reader. An example of these attributes is the chapter in which Cunnally departs from his cultural analysis to deal with the technical question of the identity of the engraver of the woodcuts in the Illustrium imagines and concludes a rather tenuous series of identifications and parallels with the observation (83-85), "Palumba, however, has a peculiar way of terminating the free-falling curls in a springy S-shaped fillip that can be considered a Morellian trait of his, if such a concept is still permissible in art-historical writing." A useful alphabetical survey of Renaissance numismatic authors and their books is confusing in its layout and hi dden between the notes to the text and a bibliography that lists only works cited in the appendix.

Like its namesake, the Illustrium imagines. Cunnally's book provides an attractive and readable introduction to a subject that merits much more systematic and rigorous attention.