This month’s first upload features a little bit of everything, with medals reaching from the early days of medallic art all the way up to the 21st century, with a healthy dose of interesting and exotic things in between. Starting with the earliest, we have this iconic type—an early mid-17th century aftercast of the classic Andrea Doria rendition by Leone Leoni...

It’s time for another thematic upload—this time focusing upon, for the most part, the architectural mastery of Jacques Wiener. Before he began his massive series of architectural medals that highlighted famous edifices across Europe (and produced in a 59mm format), he designed a series of 10 slightly smaller medals (50mm) that focused solely upon various churches from his native Kingdom of Belgium. These medals featured the overall style that he would later employ again, with intricate exterior views on the obverse, and seemingly even more intricate interior views on the reverse. Around this time, other engravers began pushing the limits of the medal, with highly refined architectural renderings being produced by Hart in Belgium, Davis in England, Bianchi in Italy, and Wilkens in Germany. While preparing this upload, we happened to visit a market that had some interesting sculpted-like figures adorning the exterior...

We’ve reached the Final Four in college basketball, and baseball has just concluded its first series of opening week, which means that we must be at the beginning of April. As such, it’s time for another grouping of art and historical medals. First up are a pair of interesting and intriguing—and rather modern—art medals from Great Britain...

Among ancient coin enthusiasts as well as classicists, it’s everyone’s favorite day filled with Caesar jokes and fake Eid Mar denarius pics. Here, we like to celebrate the somewhat haunting day with a round of spooky, macabre, or otherwise offbeat aspects in the world of tokens and medals. As such, the topic of skulls and skeletons tends to be one of the most frequent, and today’s upload is no different. To start off, since ancient coins were mentioned, here is a large bronze medal from the Paris mint from 1905...

Since our last upload, we were able to take our first real trip since pre-COVID times, traveling both to New York City as well as to upstate New York to visit family. One of the many draws of visiting at this time was the final days of the Manet/Degas exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A comparing and contrasting of the two contemporaries saw more than 160 works sharing the same space and offered a great chance to see numerous paintings in particular that would otherwise have been difficult to view so easily. Given that the exhibition was in its final days of availability, the queues were tremendously massive, with lines simply to get into the museum taking some time. While there, however, we were able to view numerous other exhibits, installations, and collections, with these glass and gold leaf Roman portrait medallions (from the exhibition The Good Life: Collecting Late Antique Art at The Met) being of particular intrigue.

Hopefully your festive season was an enjoyable one, and possibly even an extended one if vacation allowed for such relaxation or time away. With the ball having dropped in New York City (or whatever may have dropped more local to you) not yet 36 hours ago, the new year is still very fresh and full of promise. Such annual celebrations for the arrival of the next year are certainly nothing new, and are absolutely cause for celebration in medallic art as well. A perfect example is the first item in this first edition of 2024’s uploads...