Fontes Inediti Numismaticae Antiquae (FINA): a short presentation (original) (raw)
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The Classical Review, 2021
Numismatics has often been seen as a rather arcane and obscure discipline, which circuits like a satellite around the major planets of Classics, History and Archaeology. K. bookends this work by discussing a paper written by A.H.M. Jones, in 1956, in which he outlined what he thought was needed from numismatic research. This enables a succinct conclusion to the book, where K. is able to report that enormous strides have been made in the last 60 years, raising the profile of numismatics and showing its real importance to other branches of historical and archaeological research. Although the scope of this book is very broad, it is highly condensed, and so there is no room for any depth of discussion in this short review. At the outset, I can only strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in the Roman world should read this work. K. explains how coins can be used as both historical and archaeological sources, showing how more critical and quantitative methodologies have led to important developments in the assistance of both disciplines. She identifies two key themes: first, coins as a tool of political communication; second, the function of coins as monetary instruments. I believe that one should also add the nonmonetary functions of coins, such as in ritual.
JACOPO STRADA'S MAGNUM AC NOVUM OPUS. A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY CORPUS OF ANCIENT NUMISMATICS.
Cyriacus vol. 16, Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg, 2022
In c.1550, Jacopo Strada created a 30-volume corpus for Johann Jacob Fugger depicting coins of the Roman Empire from Gaius Julius Caesar to Charles V: the Magnum ac Novum Opus. It contains almost 9,000 coin illustrations. Strada also created an eleven-volume coin catalogue, A. A. A. NumismatΩn Antiquorum ΔΙΑΣΚΕΥΕ which, according to Strada, contains the complementary coin descriptions to the Magnum ac Novum Opus. In this DFG project, images and texts are combined for the first time to examine the material of these two works in its antiquarian-numismatic and art historical context. For this purpose, Strada's drawings and descriptions of coins of the Roman emperors from Caesar to Trajan were examined. The results are being entered into the databases of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance (HU Berlin) and of Translatio Nummorum (KHI Florence). The research results of this combination of diverse scholarly approaches are published in this volume. They reveal numerous new aspects and perspectives of antiquarian scholarship during the second half of the sixteenth century and thus represent an exceedingly important contribution to the history of antiquarian studies, in particular of early numismatics.
The coins from the excavations conducted in the area devastated by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year AD 79 provide a wealth of information on the circulation and hoarding of money, the methods and places of storage as well as the rate of inflation processes. Examined within a broader archaeological context, they also enable multi-faceted research in the fields of both economic and social history concerning , e.g., the scale of affluence or poverty of the contemporary communities, the structure of the functioning and the degree of the monetization of the market. It is indeed one of the very few, and at the same time most spectacular, examples of the opportunity to grasp a " living culture " in its entirety thanks to the use of archaeological methods. Unfortunately, the results of over 150 years of more regular exploration have been published in fragments to date, while the coins obtained during that period have not been featured in full detail until now and we know them mostly from various annual reports, exhibition catalogues, and some more synthetic-oriented studies, including especially the articles by L. Breglia (1950) and E. Pozzi-Paolini (1975). For this reason, it is worth taking a closer look at the commendable effort un-dertaken by the International Centre for Numismatic Studies in Naples in collaboration with the Archaeological Heritage Supervisory Authority in Naples and Pom-peii and the Numismatics Department of the University of Naples and Salerno, i.e., their project concerning a study of the circulation of coins in the Vesuvius area. As part of this project, the series Studi e Materiali of the Italian Numismatic Institute (IIN) has continued to publish, since 2005, the finds of the coins unearthed in the individual regiones of Pompeii, presenting the overall archaeological and numismatic documentation in a possibly most uniform and complete form. The present study dedicated to Regio I is the third publication of the series. The previous one, published in 2008 by R. Cantilena, discussed Regio VI, whereas three years before M. Talierico Mensitieri published a very similar study of the material from Regio IX. Edited by the latter author, the IIN issued a publication of very interesting proceedings in 2007, from the conference entitled Presenza e circolazione della moneta in area vesuviana, which was held in Naples in 2003. Publications concerning Regiones III, IV, VII, and VIII are being prepared. Apart from some short and rather contributory texts, in particular by Teresa Giove, featured mostly in various exhibition catalogues, and the above-mentioned studies by L. Breglia (1950) and E. Pozzi-Paolini (1975), this is the first comprehensive documentation
Working Abstract: There has been considerable interest in the history of numismatics and coin collecting in recent years as evidenced by the publication of significant works on the subject, including The Hidden Treasures of this Happy Island: A History of Numismatics in Britain from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Burnett, 2020) and Ars Critica Numaria: Joseph Eckhel and the Transformation of Ancient Numismatics (Woytek and Williams, eds., 2022). An insufficiently discussed aspect of this history is the role of antiquarians known primarily for their contribution to the study of ancient art to the development of numismatics – in particular Greek numismatics – in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the foundations they laid for subsequent developments which culminated in Barclay V. Head’s Historia numorum (1887). This lecture will discuss aspects of the development of Greek numismatics at the turn of the nineteenth century by focusing on the contribution of some of the most distinguished antiquarians and art connoisseurs of the period, and the way that problems posed by the study of ancient art in turn stimulated important questions and advanced knowledge about Greek coins. Building on the work of François de Callataÿ and Andrew Burnett on the significance of coins to Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), generally regarded as ‘the father of art history and archaeology’, this lecture will shed new light on the contribution to the study of numismatics of antiquarians who followed on his footsteps, including Ennio Quirino Visconti (1751-1818), Richard Payne Knight (1751-1824), and Taylor Combe (1774-1826).