Reproducing antiquity: casts of ancient coins

The project investigates the role played by casts of ancient coins in the reception of classical antiquity in the late 18th early 19th centuries. In this period, casts of ancient artifacts, especially sculptures and gems, but also coins, became very popular among the many foreign travelers visiting Italy. Produced in great quantities, these objects had a huge impact on European society as they allowed the study of the ancient world outside of Italy, but also influenced Neoclassical taste in art and architecture. Until now, reseach has focused on sets of casts of ancient gems and plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, whereas sets reproducing ancient coins have remained somewhat unexplored. In addition to sets of coin casts known from published sources, the project takes into account new evidence appeared in 2018: a group of 502 casts from Greek and Roman coins and medallions and their handwritten catalogues. Some of the casts reproduce specimens kept in the Vatican prior to 1798, when the collection was plundered by the French Republican troops commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte. Preliminary research has allowed linking this material to the figure of the Roman archaeologist Filippo Aurelio Visconti (17541831) and reconstructing his key role in the production of this and other similar sets. Archival documents connected with Visconti and the making of his sets of casts provide the rare opportunity to complement physical evidence of the objects with handwritten documents, allowing the material to be studied in a wider context.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, casts of ancient artifacts, especially sculptures and gems, but also coins, became very popular among the many foreign travelers who visited Italy. Produced in large quantities, these objects had an enormous impact on European society, allowing the study of the ancient world outside of Italy, but also influencing Neoclassical taste in art and architecture. On the one hand, the project explored the role played by casts of ancient coins in the reception of classical antiquity, a category of material that has been little studied since research has mainly focused on sets of casts of ancient gems and replicas of Greek and Roman sculpture. On the other hand, it contextualised the production of three-dimensional replicas of ancient coins in an interdisciplinary context, given the current interest in computer-based methods and technologies as well as experimentation with 3D visualisation in archaeological research and museums, which has brought the three-dimensional aspect of reproductions of ancient objects back into focus. Since the Renaissance, replicas have played an important role in accurately and faithfully documenting the past, whereas other two-dimensional media (such as sketches, drawings, photographs, etc.), although often a quicker and cheaper solution, were necessarily subject to human manipulation and error. The project took into account sets of coin casts known from published sources and new evidence that emerged in 2018. It analysed a group of more than 500 casts of Greek and Roman coins and medallions and their handwritten catalogues, some of which were kept in the Vatican museum before 1798, when the collection was looted by the French Republican troops under Napoleon Bonaparte. It has been possible to link the material to the figure of the Roman archaeologist Filippo Aurelio Visconti (17541831) and to reconstruct his key role in the production of this and other similar sets. Archival documents relating to Visconti and the making of his sets of numismatic casts provided a rare opportunity to supplement physical evidence of the objects with handwritten documents, allowing the material to be studied in a wider historical context. Furthermore, the similarities between sets of coin casts from this period and contemporary sets of gem impressions, provided an opportunity to explore the relationship between the study of ancient coins and gems in the early modern period. Research on this topic has shown that the coin casts studied in the project were made at a time when coins were beginning to be appreciated as ancient works of art, a field in which engraved gems were one of the main objects of study, and, at the same time, it has highlighted the importance of numismatics in the history of glyptic studies.