The origins of medals

The poet and historian Petrarca (1340-1374), who worked for the emperor Charles IV, wrote the following letter to his friend Lello di Stefano:

I gave him (Charles IV) some gold and silver portraits of our emperors, which bear inscriptions in very small old letters, things in which I have always had my great pleasure. Among them was a face of the Emperor Augustus, who seemed to be breathing, as it were. And I said: look at these, my emperor, who is their successor, look at them. Strive to be like them and to admire them, to form yourself according to their form and their image, because besides you, no other person is given this opportunity. Familiares. XIX, 14-15

In his letter Petrarca, one of the first Renaissance intellectuals, talks about ancient coins and how they could serve as an example for depicting power. Due to their long-lasting materials, ancient coins were considered by Petrarca and others to be the ideal medium of commemoration. These coins were therefore used as an instrument to visualize the power of the mint magistrates, their families and later Roman emperors. It did not take long for the Renaissance artists to come up with an alternative to ancient coinage, which became the medium of the medal. One of the first medals in history already created a veritable buzz. It was made by Antonio Pisanello (1395-1455) for the Byzantine emperor John VII Palaiologos. The medal quickly developed into one of the most important media of the Renaissance as more and more rulers realized its communicative power.

The medal therefore soon became a vehicle for communicating ideologies and also an object of commemoration. In early modern literary sources, the commemorative function is often linked to the precious metal of the medal, which was considered durable and unchangeable. Once struck, the medal would survive for centuries, thus spreading the message inscribed on it. At the time of its creation, the medal was designed for a distant future but was concurrently linked to a distant past, being ‘the successor’ to ancient coins.

Further reading

Stephen Scher, The currency of Fame. ​​Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (London 1994). Martin Hirsch, Matteo Burioni (eds), Die silberne Stadt. Rom im Spiegel seiner Medaillen (Munich 2021).

Brigit Blass-Simmen, ‘Facebook in der Renaissance. Die Medaille als runde Gabe’ in: Joseph Imorde and Andreas Zeising, Runde Formen. Mediale Aspekte des Zirkulären, Reihe Bild- und Kunstwissenschaften Bd 10 (Siegen 2019) 25-39.