From Collection to System: Eckhel in Italy (1772–1773) and the Numi veteres anecdoti (1775), in B. Woytek, D. Williams (eds.) Ars Critica Numaria. Joseph Eckhel (1737-1798) and the Transformation of Ancient Numismatics, Vienna 2022, pp. 247-283. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Charlotte Sophie Bentinck, Joseph Eckhel and numismatics
Virtus. Journal of Nobility Studies 25 (2018), pp. 127-143., 2018
The paper explores the numismatic interests of Charlotte Sophie countess Bentinck (1715-1800) and her correspondence with the Austrian numismatist Joseph Eckhel (1737-1798)
Bernhard Woytek - Daniela Williams (eds.), Ars Critica Numaria. Joseph Eckhel (1737 - 1798) and the Transformation of Ancient Numismatics, 2022
In my paper, I trace the eighteenth-century development towards classification in the Classics. It is my intention to allocate Eckhel’s oeuvre its proper place in a wider context. For this reason, I present three of the most important and influential antiquarian works composed during the eighteenth century in order to visualise this development: Bernard de Montfaucon’s (1655-1741) “L’Antiquité expliquée représentée en figures”, published in 1719, still uses a classification that originated with an antiquarian culture whose classification went back all the way to Varro’s division of ancient Roman culture into antiquitates publicae, privatae, sacrae and militares. Montfaucon intended to offer a complete view of Classical Antiquity in his work, which includes illustrations of ca. 40,000 objects. The illustrated objects served as either confirmation or correction of written sources and occasionally as an additional historical source. He accorded the image a value of its own as testimonial and thereby differentiated his methodology from that of his predecessors whose works gave preference to written sources. Nonetheless, he still refrained from sketching out a history of either progress or style of the illustrated works of art. In 1752, Anne-Claude-Philippe Comte de Caylus (1692-1765) presented antiquities in his “Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines“, according to a strict classification system that put each object into its cultural and chronological place. To achieve this, he intended to categorise some of the monuments according to style and to connect them—as far as possible—to literary sources. In reality, he never really fulfilled his methodological promises, since he did not yet have at his disposal a proper instrumentarium that would allow him to trace the internal development within the national styles distinguished by himself. He also limited the discussion of antiquities too much to the samples then in his own collection. He deserves praise, though, for his material analysis, which followed the classification system developed for the natural sciences, as well as for his detailed visual and literary description. Together with his comparisons and the facts he gathered they served in due course as the point of departure for a topographical, chronological, typological and iconographical classification of the objects and of their artistic value. In 1764, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) for the first time managed to sketch out the changing morphology of ancient art in his “Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums” and to offer a modern, art historical description of Greek art, which found its bearings with the help of dates and materiality. He presented different levels of development and defined style as a term usefully adopted as a criterion of order. He distinguished Greek from Etruscan art and included works of art mentioned in ancient sources in his deliberations. He also considered monuments as works of art in their own right. Only by using this methodology, it became possible to date each work of art, not yet attributed to an artist, as well as newly discovered objects and to put them into their historical context. It is thus possible to conclude that the innovative classification system developed for the field of numismatics by Joseph Hilarius Eckhel (1737-1798) in the 1770s, and published from 1792 under the title of “Doctrina numorum veterum”, fits closely with the methodological zeitgeist as manifest by the oeuvre of Winckelmann and of the comte de Caylus.
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).
Agli albori della numismatica: i nummi punici nella letteratura erudita
in MONETE SACRE. UN WEBGIS PER LE MONETE PUNICHE NEI CONTESTI SACRI MEDITERRANEI, 2022
The origins of Punic numismatics are still quite unexplored. This paper provides a small bibliographic review of the numismatic books appeared between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries that deal with this topic, to outline some evolutionary features of the discipline.
THE NUMISMATIC COLLECTION OF THE REGIONAL HISTORICAL MUSEUM AT KYUSTENDIL (ANCIENT ULPIA PAUTALIA)
The initiators of this series Coin Collection and Coin Hoards in Bulgaria (CCCHBulg), intend to make public the collections of ancient coins from those museums in Bulgaria where they have access and where they can find adherent followers, co-authors, and people who are aware of the importance of ‘sealed’ information. The philosophy of the authors and the contributors of this project are based on the understanding that this type of information is not a personal or even a national property in perpetuity, but is above all - a universal possession. The authors of the present catalogue have the pleasure of announcing in volume two of the series CCCHBulg, the publication for the first time of several exceptionally interesting monetary treasures discovered within the territory of today’s South-west Bulgaria. In Roman times these territories were administered by the city of Pautalia.