Medallions

Faces of Power. Roman Gold Coins from the Victor A. Adda Collection. Edited by H. Gitler and G. Gambash, 2017

The exhibition Faces of Power Roman Gold Coins from the Victor A. Adda Collection at the Israel Museum displays 75 coins that Jackie Adda Coen donated and as a tribute to a great collector and connoisseur, Victor A. Adda. These 75 eye-catching golden coins from Adda’s collection have never before been displayed to the public. Bearing the portraits of Roman emperors and their family members, these coins offer a rare glimpse into the world of the rulers of the Roman Empire, as well as revealing the great artistic skill involved in their creation and the use of the human face to reflect a person’s character, mostly as a means of propaganda. The exhibition follows the development of portraits on coinage over a period of almost 350 years, and relates to the slogans on the coins –– the majority of which include words relating to victory, security and peace –– displaying how little propaganda has changed over thousands of years. In conjunction with the exhibition we published a book with the same name as that of the exhibition. The content of this book is a result of numerous discussions I had with Jackie and our mutual interest in bringing together a group of specialists on Roman numismatics to contribute from their knowledge in order to produce an extensive work that covers the periods to which the 75 gold coins date. This publication is a result of the work of 17 devoted scholars who are first of all my friends. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to each one of them. The book begins with a personal touch, the life story of Victor A. Adda in Jackie’s own words. This lovely text takes us back to Alexandria at the turn of the twentieth century. Arturo Russo, to whom we are ever indebted for funding and publishing this volume, describes the Adda collection in context, as one of the century’s major collections of Roman gold coins. The collection consists of just over 1,000 coins, of which the main nucleus is Roman: 761 aurei and solidi covering a period from Julius Caesar to Romulus Augustulus, from the last years of the republic to the end of the empire. Side by side with Roman coins, the Adda collection also included 38 Byzantine gold coins; 65 Bosporus staters; 28 Greek pieces and the 11 issues (+ one small cake ingot) of the renowned Delta hoard. The attractive selection of 106 Egyptian coins begins with a beautiful Nectenebo II stater depicting a bridled horse and two hieroglyphs: collar with six beads (nwb = gold), heart and windpipe (nfr = good). It is followed by an impressive selection of Ptolemaic gold and silver issues, which culminated with Cleopatra at Ascalon. Catharine Lorber, a leading expert on Ptolemaic coins and one of my dearest friends, commented the following on this section of the collection: “The greatest rarity that should be pointed out, even more than the wonderful Cleopatra tetradrachm of Ascalon, is a unique mnaieion depicting the radiate Ptolemy V (without the spear), dated to year 6. Also important and worth mentioning are two extremely rare portrait mnaieia of Arsinoe III, one from Alexandria and the other from a Syro-Phoenician mint, and a tetradrachm and didrachm of Paphos depicting Ptolemy VIII with a radiate diadem and wearing the aegis like a chlamys. These varieties are the only coin portraits of Arsinoe III and Ptolemy VIII and accordingly the only reliable evidence we have for their appearance. Overall, I would observe that the Ptolemaic collection favors gold over silver and is especially strong in third-century issues, no doubt reflecting Victor A. Adda’s ability to acquire coins from the Benha hoard of 1936 (IGCH 1694). Adda made a point of collecting unpublished varieties, especially of mnaieia in the name of Arsinoe Philadelphus, and very rare small denominations like the half mnaieion depicting the radiate Ptolemy III and the quarter mnaieion of the K-series Arsinoes. One can observe that he was interested in style, favoring coins of beautiful style but also ensuring that his collection included a range of attractive or interesting styles, especially in the portraiture of Arsinoe Philadelphus. It’s obvious that Victor A. Adda was extremely knowledgeable about Ptolemaic gold coinage, and that he possessed exquisite taste”. A selection of 16 pages of Victor’s Adda’s handwritten French catalogue are illustrated along with scannings of the plates of the entire Victor A. Adda collection, which appeared in a private catalogue produced by Christie’s in 1986 for the family (part of the Victor A. Adda collection was sold in two Christie’s auctions in 1984 and 1985). A brief introduction about the aureus as the premier coin in the Roman monetary economy is followed by papers written by 14 scholars, covering a period of more than 300 years, from the end of the republic (first century BCE) to the beginning of the fourth century CE (Richard Abdy, Michel Amandry, Roger Bland, Andrew Burnett, Aleksander Bursche, Gil Gambash, Cristian Gazdac, Haim Gitler, Achim Lichtenberger, Jerome Mairat, Rodolfo Martini, Markus Peter, Johan van Heesch, Bernhard E. Woytek). These papers focus on crucial developments during the Golden Age of the Roman Empire as reflected by the Adda coins. In a comprehensive overview of this volume, Matti Fischer outlines a framework for analysis of the Roman emperors’ portraits themselves. This includes the use of art-historical methods such as analysis of the frame, composition, the physiognomy, the iconography of the bust and face and meanings inherent in the use of style, and the special type of production and distribution unique to coins. He provides insights into the meaning of identity and value while projecting new concepts relevant to research both of ancient coins and of modern uses of the face. Yaniv Schauer, co-curator of the exhibition, prepared with the help of Jonathan Grimaldi from NAC an extensive catalogue of 611 of 1,012 coins from the original collection that are dated to the period under discussion. This catalogue includes valuable information on the provenance of those specimens that Victor Adda purchased on the antiquities market. I would like to thank my dear friend Gil Gambash for co-editing this volume and for his most productive insights during our dialogues about the exhibition.

Pre-Face of the book Faces of Power. Roman Gold Coins from the Victor A. Adda Collection, published in conjunction to the exhibition by the same name at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

This paper gathers together previously published parts and a new section on the Historia Augusta. It is mainly a list of references from texts with short discussion.

The Roman coinage in the 4 th and 5 th century AD, 2013

This paper is the last in a series of papers on Roman coins in which I express my views on the Roman monetary system covering a period of four centuries. Originally I published the information in a book on Roman coins written in Dutch. I decided to lift some parts out of the book, translate them into English and publish the information in the form of short articles on academia.edu.

Did Roman Imperial coin types have significant news or propaganda content, or were they generic? This article (focussing on the coinage of Trajan) argues that this depends on what part of the coinage is considered. The gold and bronze coins had substantial news content, but the silver coinage generally did not. This situation arose because two factors, sometimes conflicting, governed the choice of coin types in Trajan’s mint: first, the desire to select topical images; second, the need to maintain uninterrupted the mass-production of coins. As a result, the lower-volume portions of the coinage were adorned with more up-to-date types, and these were changed often; the higher-volume coinage on the other hand – – especially the silver denarii – – tended to employ generic and outdated types.

Roman coins are peculiar objects. In the first place, they were the official means of payment of the Roman Empire and thus the most important mass product of the pre-modern era. Because of the many images and texts depicted on ancient coins, we can also correctly refer to Roman coins as the first mass medium of antiquity. Given their intrinsic monetary function, they reached the remotest corners of the empire and were able to communicate the messages of the imperial administration to the people. However, in their aesthetics—both in their materiality and in their function as a means of communication—Roman coins differ fundamentally from their modern relatives. It is precisely this that the present exhibition takes as a starting point, aiming to present a broad perspective of the phenomenon of Roman coins and their peculiar aesthetics and significance in an ancient context. To this end, we have chosen five representative thematic areas, which we believe can be used to present the most important perspectives on ancient life: Beautiful and Ugly / Portraits / Representations of Nature / Dynasties / Role Models. The broad spectrum of themes makes it clear; the beauty or specific nature of these objects is and was truly in the eye of the beholder.