HK CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library NK6352 .H64 + Portrait medals of Italian artists of th 3 1924 032 523 817 olin Overs DATE DUE r' i— 1""^ iJiSSHItr GAYLORD PHINTEO iN U.S.A. A Of this Volume 750 copies have been printed — of which 100 are reserved to the United States of America — and the type distributed. PORTRAIT MEDALS OF ITALIAN ARTISTS OF THE RENAISSANCE Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924032523817 Hans Memlinc Antwerp : Royal Museum NICCOLO DI FORZORE SPINELLI PORTRAIT MEDALS OF ITALIAN ARTISTS OF THE RENAISSANCE. ILLUSTRATED AND DESCRIBED, WITH AN IN- TRODUCTORY ESSAY ON THE ITALIAN MEDAL, BY G. F. HILL PHILIP LEE WARNER, PUBLISHER TO THE MEDICI SOCIETY, LIMITED 7 GRAFTON ST, LONDON, W. 19 12 MADE AND PRINTED IN GKBAT BKITAIN. TO THE MEMORY OF MAX ROSENHEIM PREFACE THIS book gives a description, in more or less chron- ological order, of between sixty and seventy contem- porary medals with portraits of Italian artists of the Renaissance. They are chosen solely with an iconographic intention; the question whether they are good or bad exam- ples of the art of the medallist is but secondary. They often represent our only opportunity of knowing what the features of the persons in question were like; within their limita- tions, which are discussed in the introduction, they are usually the most trustworthy documents. The introduction deals generally — some may think, too generally — with the Italian portrait medal of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in its relation to the culture of the Renaissance, touching incidentally on its genesis and develop- ment, though without in any way attempting to write a history of the subject. For such a history the reader may be referred to Fabriczy's book, Italian Medals^ which is access- ible in an English translation (1904) by Mrs. Hamilton. Finally, the introduction discusses the value of medals as evidence for portraiture. In addition to the aCtual medals, a certain number of supplementary illustrations are intro- duced; these will be welcome to those who find objefts so small as medals usually are a trial to their patience. But my business is primarily to publish the medals; comparison with other portraits may be left to more competent critics. The frontispiece, for the insertion of which it is difficult to find a logical excuse, may perhaps be defended as giving the painters their revenge on the medallists. The beautiful por- b X PREFACE trait in the UfEzi of a young man holding a medal of Cosimo Vecchio might have been included on the same ground. Recently M. de Foville has sought to identify him with Cristoforo Geremia. The identification depends on the theory that Cristoforo made the medal of Cosimo which the young man is represented as holding; and that theory, due to M. De la Tour, is at present, for all its attractiveness, not quite proven. Those who are familiar with the standard works on Italian medals will notice certain omissions from this volume. Some I have passed over, because I have been quite unable to trace a specimen, and because the descriptions available do not allow one to ascribe the medal to a definite date. This applies to the medals of Battista Franco and Giovanni Battista Lonati. Others I have omitted because the persons seem to have been, if architects, yet rather engineers or men of science than artists: such are Giannello della Torre, Andrea Te6tori (nothing seems to be known about him, but the reverse of his medal suggests that he was a bridge-builder), and Camillo Agrippa (he may have drawn the piftures for his book on the Scientia d'Arme, but if that is his only title to be called an artist, he may be left in peace). I may also mention here the medal of Giovanni Peruzzo Bartolelli of Fano, of which the only known specimen was published by Castellani [Rivista Italiana di Numismatica for 1 9 1 o) ; this man was an obscure sculptor and miniator, and should have been included, but has escaped — perhaps sola mea socordia. Lorenzo Ciglamocchi, although Milanesi's attribution to him of his own portrait is not wholly absurd, has not been given the benefit of the doubt; and the Antonio Marescotti whose portrait appears on a medal is probably not the medallist of that name but some relation. No one, I suppose, will expert to find here the portrait of the royal amateur, Rene d'Anjou. There are two little medals, signed v - f • , of Paolo Farinata and Properzia de' Rossi, but it is doubtful whether either of them is as early even as the time of Farinata, and they are in any case wretched productions. With other medals omitted. PREFACE xi such as those of Primaticcio and Francia, I have dealt in the introdudtion. Finally, lest any one should miss a medal of Leonardo da Vinci, which has found its way into at least one publication as a work of the sixteenth century, it should be said that it bears the date 1667. To make up for these omissions, I may be excused for having allowed two ladies, Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi, to make their way into this gallery after the closing time of 1 600. If the reader finds a disproportionate amount of space accorded to comparatively obscure artists, he must pardon it, on the ground that the information given is more difficult to obtain than in the case of better known persons, so that it seems as well to put it upon record here for what it is worth. The acknowledgments which must now be made seem long out of all proportion to a book of such slight dimensions and small importance as this ; but the process of obtaining casts of the rarer medals has laid me under a heavy obliga- tion to many, which must not pass unnoticed. Apart from a general acknowledgment to the authorities of the various public museums from which examples have been drawn, as will be seen from the notes attached to the descriptions, I must make particularly grateful mention of M. Gustave Dreyfus, M. J. de Foville, Commendatore Francesco Gnecchi, Mr. T. W. Greene, Dr. Georg Habich, Mr. H. P. Home, M. Rene Jean, Ritter August von Loehr, Mr. H. P. Mitchell, Mr. Henry Oppenheimer, Count Nicolo Papadopoli, Dr. Kurt Regling and Mr. Maurice Rosenheim. It is also necessary to say that the book would probably never have seen the light but for the sympathy and encouragement of Dr. Emil Steinmann, who urged me to work up the raw material which I showed him, and has throughout given me the most valuable assistance and advice. I have restricted the bibliographical notes severely, and have omitted those general sources of information to which the student of the history of art naturally turns. Foremost among these is the great Lexikon edited by Prof. Ulrich xii PREFACE Thieme, of which I have been able to use the first five volumes; but the editor, with his well-known courtesy, has placed me under a further obligation by supplying references to the literature on Giovanni Battista della Croce and Andrea Fosco. The works of A. Armand {Les Medailleurs Italiens, 1 883-1 887), of J. Friedlander [Die italienischen Schaumunzen des funfzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1882) and of C. von Fabriczy {Italian Medals, English transl. by Mrs. Hamilton, 1904) have naturally been always at my side ; to Heiss's overladen volumes, which seldom add anything relevant, except illus- trations, to the work of his predecessors, less acknowledgment is due. G. F. H. 1912 CONTENTS PAGE Preface ........ ix Introduftion : The Italian Medal . . . . i Description of the Medals ..... 27 See detailed list, pp. xv-xvii. Indexes . . . . . . . . .83 Of the Plates, those after reliefs, painted portraits, etc., are placed in the Text, while those repro- ducing Medals will be found at the end of the volume. See the List of Illustrations, pp. xv-xvii. ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE IN COLOUR Frontispiece Portrait of Niccolo di Forzore Spinelli, by Hans Memlinc. (Antwerp: Royal Museum.) PLATES IN MONOCHROME Except where positions are assigned^ these will be found in sequence at end Leone Battista Albert! {page 29) Plate XVI, No. i. Plate XVn, Nos. 2, 3. Plate XVIII, No. 4. Antonio Pisano (Pisanello) {p. 31) Plate XVIII, Nos. 5, 6. Antonio Averlino (Filarete) {p. 32) Plate I at p. 32. Plate XVIII, No. 7. Giovanni Boldu {p. 33) Plate XIX, Nos. 8, 9. Lysippus Junior \p. 35) Plate XX, No. 10. Giovanni Candida [p. 37) Plate XX, Nos. i r, 12. Gentile Bellini {p. 38) Plates II, III at p. 38. Plate XX, No. 13. Giovanni Bellini [p. 39) Plate lY at p. 40. Plate XX, No. 14. Francesco Filarete {p. 40) Plate XXI, No. 15. Francesco Lancilotti {p. 40) Plate XXI, No. 16. Donato di Angelo Bramante {p. 41) Plate V at p. 42. Plate XXI, No. 17. Vettor Gambello {p. 43) Plate XXI, No. 18. Giovanni Caroto (j). 44) Plate XXII, No. 19. Giulio della Torre {p. 44) Plate XXII, Nos. 20, 21. Gian Maria Pomedelli (/>. 46) Plate XXIII, No. 22. Gian Pietro Crivelli {p. 47) Plate XXIII, No. 23. Valerio Belli {p. 48) Plate XXIII, Nos. 24, 25. Riccio {p. 49) Plate XXIII, No. 26. Innocenzo da Imola {p. 51) Plate XXIII, No. 27. XV xvi ILLUSTRATIONS Giovanni dal Cavino {p. 51) Plate XXIII, No. 28 Giulio Clovio {p. 52) Plate VI at p. 52. Plate XXIII, No. 29 Leone Leoni {p. 53) Plate XXIV, Nos. 30, 31 Baccio Bandinelli {p. ^i,) Plate VII at p. 54. Plate XXIV, No. 32 Giulio Campi {p. SS) P^^*^ XXIV, No. 33 Titian [p. 56) Plates VIII, IX at p. 56. Plate XXIV, Nos. 34, 35 Francesco da Sangallo {p. 57) Plate X at p. 58 Plate XXIV, No. 36. Plate XXV, No. 37 Giovanni Battista Caselli {p. 58) Plate XXV, No. 38 Francesco Parolaro {p. 59) Not Illustrated. Sophonisba Angussola [p. 59) Plate XI at p. 60. Plate XXV, No. 39 Michelangelo Buonarroti [p. 60) Plate XII at p. 62. Plate XXVI, Nos. 40, 40a, 40b Gianpaolo Lomazzo [p. 62) Plate XXVI, Nos. 41, 42 Girolamo Figino {p. 63) Plate XXVI, No. 43 Alfonso Ruspagiari {p. 64) Plate XXVII, No. 44 Alessandro Ardenti \p. 65) Plate XXVI, No. 45 Andrea Fosco {p. 66) Plate XXVII, No. 46 Jacopo Tatti (Sansovino) [p. 67) Plates XIII, XIV at p. 66. Plate XXVIII, No. 47 Timotheus Refatus {p. 67) Plate XXVIII, No. 48 Bernardino Campi {p. 68) Plate XXVIII, No. 49 Giorgio Vasari [p. 68) Plate XV «/^. 70. Plate XXVIII, No. 50 Jacopo Primavera {p. 69) Plate XXVIII, No. 51 Jacopo da Trezzo [p. 70) Plate XXIX, No. 52 Francesco Volterrano {p. 71) Plate XXIX, No. 53 Diana Scultore (/>. 72) Plate XXIX, No. 54 Girolamo Miseroni {p. 73) Plate XXIX, No. 55 Pietro Ferabosco {p. 74) Plate XXIX, No. 56 Antonio Abondio the Younger {p. 75) Plate XXIX, No. 57 Federigo Zucchero [p. 76) Plate XV at p. 70. Plate XXX, Nos. 58, 59 ILLUSTRATIONS xvii Alessandro Vittoria {p. jy) Plate XXX, No. 60. Bernardino India {p. 78) Plate XXX, No. 61. Alessandro Allori {p. 78) Plate XXX, No. 62. Domenico Fontana {p. 79) Plate XXX, Nos. 63, 64. Giovanni Battista della Croce [p. 80) Plate XXXI, No. 65. Lavinia Fontana (/». 81) Plate XXXI, No. 66. Artemisia Gentileschi {p. 81) Plate XXXI, No. 67. Seventeenth Century Medals of Fr. Francia, Guercino and Primaticcio {p. 24) Plate XXXII. INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION THE ITALIAN MEDAL Oi/ro; exetvoi. — Aristotle. A FRIEND, who is distinguished no less by his skill as an artist than by his fine discernment as a colledtor and critic, once explained to me his reason for not colle6ting Italian medals. Real artistic quality, he felt, is not to be found in the rank and file of medallists, and the leaders who may lay claim to such quality are very few. Now that, if it is true, and it is true to a certain degree, is a very good reason why a private collector, who gathers together the things which please his artistic sense, should abstain from " making a series " of medals. But let us look into the statement a little more closely. It is easy for one whose chief recreation is the study — though not the colledl- ing — of Italian medals to over-estimate their interest ; but nevertheless a question forces itself to the front: is that denial of artistic quality to all but a few leading masters more justified in the case of Italian medals than elsewhere in Italian plastic art? Is there not a tendency indiscriminately to over-value any relic of quattrocento sculpture, because it is Italian and early ? To ask this question is not to deny the undoubted charm which the mere atmosphere of the fifteenth century in Italy communicates to even the most journeyman work. But compare the vast mass of such art with the remains of Greek sculpture, and how immeasurably far behind the Italian is left ! how often he mistakes rant for emotion, brutality for force, eccentricity for originality! That is all due to the lack of intellectual definition, which is the soul of sculpture, and which the Greek demanded B 2 MEDALS AND SCULPTURE above all things in plastic art. Now the defe6ts of Italian sculpture are refledted in Italian medals ; it would be stupid to be blind to, that faft, or to claim that they rank higher than Italian statuary or relief. What it is necessary to recog- nize is that the comparative rarity of works of sculpture, relatively to the large numbers of medals extant, is liable to make us estimate the larger works more favourably than we should if they had more competitors in their own line. But it is perhaps idle to spend ink and paper on comparisons of this sort. After all, there remain the great achievements. There remain such portraits as Pisanello's Sigismondo and Novello Malatesta and Don liligo d'Avalos, as Enzola's Cos- tanzo Sforza, as the Florentine heads of Filippo and Nonina Strozzi, or that nameless Mantuan's bust of Giulia Astallia. There remain such compositions as Pisanello's great eagle, majestic against the sky, with lesser birds of prey waiting on his pleasure; or his young King Alfonso hurling himself upon the boar, the slight but athletic frame showing up vividly against the bristly mass of the monster into whom he is about to plunge his weapon ; or, on the medal of Cecilia Gonzaga, Innocence sitting dreaming in the moonlight, with the tamed unicorn by her side ; or the Castle of Rimini, as Pasti shows it, and as no sculptor could better it, on his medal of Sigismondo. It is true that, after Pisanello and the great time, there are not many compositions which thrill one to a degree even remotely approaching the effeft of that figure of Innocence. Indeed, the critic was not far out who declared it to be the most beautiful composition of all that he had seen ; nor could that other painter-critic, who made it the frontispiece, nay, the only illustration, to his book on the science of picSure-making, have chosen more happily. A medal, to show painters how to paint ! If the medallist's art justifies itself thus, it is because even in its small circumfer- ence — perhaps the more clearly because of its limited space — the medal can show all the qualities that really matter in great art, all that make for real largeness of style, the qualities of clarity, of reserve, of poised mass and harmony of line, EXPRESSION OF CHARACTER 3 as well as the nobility of idea which after all is the essence of the whole thing. So much for the question of what may be called pure artistic value — which is a term I use only for convenience, knowing well that I shall not be misunderstood to mean that art can have any value apart from intellectual or spiritual content. But there is another aspeft of the Italian medal in which its importance, though perhaps not commonly recog- nized, is indisputable. It has been said by Cornelius von Fabriczy that the medallic art may be regarded as par ex- cellence the art of the Renaissance. The medal served exa6tly that purpose which was nearest to the heart of the Italian of that period; and that was the expression of his virtu, the glorification of his personality. It is a coincidence in which the Italian would have delighted, that the word " charafter," which comes nearest to the sense of virtii, was used by the Greeks in the sense of the design on a coin. But I need not dwell longer on what Fabriczy has put so much better than I can put it.^ Be it noted, too, that the opinion which he expresses was not reached hastily, but was the ripe fruit of a life-long study of Italian sculpture as a whole. The Italian medal, then, is a highly significant refledtion of the Italian charadler. Let us consider for a moment, and we shall see how conveniently it fitted into the frame of mind of the average cultured Italian of the Renaissance. The desire to see one's own portrait is of course the same all the world over ; there is nothing peculiarly Italian in that. The reason why the art was first developed in Italy is to be found in its relation to antiquity. The influence of antiquity on Italian art is a subjedt on which it is difficult to be just. It is easy to protest against the notion that the Italians sought to " revive " or " imitate " the antique. It is easy also, or at any rate fascinating to the investigator, to trace back Renais- sance motifs to classical originals. But in making that protest one is liable to take refuge in generalities, saying that those ' In the Introdudlion (pp. 15 f.) to his Italian Medals (London, 1904). 4 RELATION TO ANTIQUITY Italians are most antique in spirit who show least sign of imitating antiquity; which may be true, but does not take us far. And, on the other hand, in tracking classical sources, one divines no more of the spirit of the work of art, than does the commentator who assigns each phrase of Tennyson to its origin in Catullus or Vergil. But if we are looking at the artistic produft of the Italians not as works of art, but simply to see what light it throws on Italian chara6ler, then those relations with other, older arts acquire historical and ethical significance. Italian art, so far as it is good, is, as art, for all time ; but Italian art, good, bad, or indifferent, is also signifi- cant for the historian of Italy. The " white radiance " is the same for eternity ; but it is to the colours that stain it that the student of national charafter has to devote his attention. From this point of view a thing of comparatively small artistic value often attains historical significance ; and such a thing is the relation of the Italian medal to the antique. I have discussed the subje6t elsewhere,^ but may perhaps be forgiven for repeating myself here to a certain extent. Of all objefts of antiquity, the commonest, if we except potsherds, are most probably coins. In Italy coins of the Roman Empire are found in enormous quantities, and since these bear the portraits of the Emperors and members of their families, it is and always has been an easy thing for any one with average intelligence to become familiar with the features of the rulers of ancient Rome. Even the average educated Englishman still retains a curiosity about the por- traits of the " twelve Caesars," or Emperors like Constantine of whom he has heard. How much more keen must have been the appeal of these portraits to those of the Italians them- selves who had any sort of historic sense! Even before the time of Petrarch and Cola di Rienzo there may have been anti- quaries, unknown to fame, who regarded these tiny remains of the ancient glory of Rome with respedt, if not enthusiasm. Of Petrarch we know that he collefted coins and gems, ' Burlington Magazine, Feb. 191 1, pp. 259-268. EARLY COLLECTORS 5 getting them from vine-dressers, who used to bring them to him in Rome. We know also that in 1355 he took advan- tage of an audience with the Emperor Charles IV at Mantua, to show him coins of the ancient Emperors and improve the occasion with a moral discourse. The scholar Cyriac of Ancona, again, in 1433, when Sigismund was on his way to be crowned at Rome, went to meet him at Siena, and showing him a gold coin of Trajan pleaded with him for a crusade against the Turks. We may guess that it was one of the coins commemorating Trajan's Parthian victories. But per- haps the most charafteristic things are those which are re- corded of Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Naples, the patron of Pisanello. Beccadelli tells us that he collefted the coins of the famous emperors, and of Julius Caesar above all others, acquiring them from all parts of Italy, and preserving them with almost religious care in an ivory cabinet. Since, he used to say, no other portraits of these men any longer existed, he took a marvellous delight in them, and was in a manner inflamed by them with a passion for virtue and glory. At Puteoli he acquired a gold coin of Nero on which the emperor claims to have closed the temple of Janus, by establishing peace throughout the world ; and Aeneas Sylvius records that Alfonso condemned this arrogation by the Roman emperor of a glory to which he had no right. It is always the ethical point of view that interests the colledlor of this period; appreciation of the artistic quality of the objefts which they collected was even rarer then than it is now among colle6tors. But even the ethical point of view has its merits. One cannot imagine a collector of Roman gold coins at the present day moralizing on the wickedness of Nero before he considers whether the specimen he has ac- quired is a rare or common variety. To bring the great men of the past vividly before their eyes was, then, the objeft of the colledtors of the early Renaissance, as it was, for a modern instance, the objedt of Goethe. And the next step was obvious — to follow the example of the great men of antiquity, and have your portrait 6 MEDALS AND COINS put upon a coin. But here was a difficulty: at the beginning of the fifteenth century the coins were small things, affording little scope for portraiture. It is true that Frederick II, in the thirteenth century, had made a spirited attempt to revive portraiture on his gold coinage in the old Roman style; but this had remained almost without effeft. Its barrenness was probably due to the fa6t that the craftsmen who engraved the dies were bound by traditions which made it difficult to induce them to adopt any improvement. So the mediaeval tradition of the flat coinage with merely ornamental or heraldic designs remained in force. And the princes satisfied their vanity, or let us call it their passion for imitating the great men of antiquity, by adopting the medal. It is not a little significant that the Florentine medallist Niccolo di Forzore Spinelli, in Memlinc's portrait which appears as the fron- tispiece to this book, is represented holding a coin of Nero. In 1446 Flavio Biondo wrote to Leonello d'Este, congratulat- ing him on having placed his portrait and name on coins after the fashion of the Roman Emperors. He was referring, as a matter of faft, not to coins — for none of Leonello's coins bear his portrait — but to medals. One may smile a little to think of this comparison of the private medals, made to please the ruler of a petty Italian marquisate, with the imperial world-currency of the Roman Empire. But con- tempt turns to admiration when one realizes that these medals are the work of one of the most perfect artists, in his sphere, that Italy produced. About eight years before Flavio Biondo wrote, Pisanello made his first medal, and a new art sprang into existence. For the anticipations of his work are indeed anticipations, and not the real thing. They are, it is true, of very great interest, illustrating just those tendencies of which I have spoken, to evoke the spirit of antiquity, and to try to rank oneself with the ancients in style of portraiture at least. We have the medallions of Constantine and Heraclius, mediaeval attempts, probably of northern origin, to represent the champions of the Christian faith — not humble martyrs, be PISANELLO 7 it understood, but Roman Emperors. It was Christian an- tiquity, not as Christian, but rather as Roman, that seems to have interested the person who ordered those medals. We have, on the other hand, the contemporary portraits of the two Carrara, Francesco the Elder and Francesco the Younger, made in 1390, probably in Venice or Padua. The former are goldsmith's work, cast and chased ; the latter are struck from dies, the work of coin-engravers, strongly in- fluenced, as regards the handling of the portraits, by Roman coins. Neither form of medal had in it the possibility of development. Another generation was to pass before Antonio Pisano of Verona had his great idea. It seems to have been suggested to him by the visit to Italy in 1438 of the Emperor John VIII Palaeologus. Pisanello was at Ferrara at the time when the Emperor arrived — a pi6turesque figure which left its mark on many an artist's work : " wearing a Greek dress of Damascus bro- cade, very rich, with a Greek bonnet, on the point of which was a very fine jewel : a very handsome man with a beard worn in the Greek fashion."^ John was the living repre- sentative of the mighty tradition of the Roman Empire. He was more representative of it than were the Roman Em- perors of the West, seeing that the seat of Empire in Constantinople had been occupied by Emperors continuously from the time of Constantine ; whereas in Rome, since the end of the fifth century, Roman Emperors had been con- spicuous by their absence. Pisanello may have seen some of the ancient Roman medallions, like that sumptuous gold piece of Justinian the Great, on which the Emperor rides forth accompanied by the Goddess of Victory. Or he may have seen the mediaeval medallion of Constantine, with its striking equestrian figure. It seems certain that when he composed the medal of Palaeologus he was consciously con- tinuing the long series of Roman Imperial medallions. The irony of it all perhaps he did not see: the noblest of all these ^ Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vita di Eugenia IV Papa, c. xiv. 8 THE REVERSE medallions was made for a weak and inefFeftual, if pidtur- esque, sovereign, who rides not forth to viftory, but ambles peaceably along the road, past the wayside cross, the symbol of that faith which under his successor was to be driven from its imperial throne by the advancing forces of Islam. Pisan- ello's medal of Palaeologus links on to the ancient Roman medallion, but it also looks forward. Nothing could mark more significantly the attitude of Italian art to its teacher, antiquity; it pays this tribute of respe6t to tradition, and then goes on its way rejoicing. If I am right in my dating of the portraits of Leone Battista Alberti (Plates XVI and XVII), these also, or at least the Dreyfus version, may be anticipations of Pisanello's work. They are, however, like the other medals mentioned above, not quite the real thing. That is to say, they are small pieces of sculpture in relief, without reverses (the inscription on the reverse of the smallest medal hardly counts in this respeft). The true medal is essentially self-contained; it does not, like the relief, require a setting; it is designed to be held in the hand, and turned about. The plaque presup- poses a frame or background, just as the relief on a large scale requires a wall : something that it decorates, and with- out which it does not fulfil its purpose. Now too many medallists, not merely in the present age, but even in the fifteenth century, neglected their reverses; and some who have written about medals have also neglefted them, as the reader will perhaps remark when he finds so few reverses illustrated in these pages. If the latter omission is due to economy, the former is to be put down to laziness or lack of power to compose. However that may be, there is no denying that the reverse is a very important, if not integral part of the true medal. It gives an opportunity for supplying a still more intimate touch than even the portrait by itself can convey. When the medal had once started on its career, when not only Byzantine Emperors, or Mar- quises of Ferrara or Mantua, but ordinary mortals had begun to have medals made of themselves, then these little portraits. IMPRESE 9 which could by casting be reproduced an indefinite number of times, began to serve much the same purpose as a photo- graph does nowadays. You sent copies of your medal to all your friends. To realize how great a boon this must have seemed to be, we have only to remember that in the early fifteenth century no other form of mechanical reprodudtion of a work of art was available. When therefore Pisanello painted his portrait of Leonello d'Este and at the same time made a medal of him, the medal served the purpose of an engraved or photographic reprodudtion. The connexion, at least in the outset, between painter and medallist was close and significant. But in addition to the portrait, the medal, as I have said, carried a reverse; and this was utilized by Pisanello, and by many another after him, to convey the impresa or device proper to the person represented. Now that impresa was something even more strictly per- sonal to the man represented than would have been his sign manual or his acknowledged signet. These indeed every one would recognize to be his ; but the essence of the impresa was its secrecy and obscurity ; it was designed to present the greatest possible difficulty to any one who wished to penetrate its meaning. Small wonder, then, that of the many devices of Leonello, there is only one of which the sense is known to us, and that but partially. In a moment of expan- sion the medallist " Nicholaus " put the explanatory legend " Quod vides ne vide " round the blindfolded lynx, which is thus seen to be the symbol of state-craft. But even though we know this we suspedt that the comfortable cushion on which the animal is sitting must have some further hidden significance. One feels that these devices and their elaborate obscurities are sometimes a little childish, and that the persons who de- lighted in having them designed must have had very little sense of the realities of life. The solemnity with which these designs were regarded was portentous. All sorts of rules of the game were invented. For instance, Sertorio Quattromani, writing in 1564 to Annibal Caro (who was c lo THE FLORENTINES himself a great inventor of devices) says that the rules of the impresa do not allow that the motto should name the adtual things which are represented ; thus if your motto is "Chirone magistro," you must not represent the centaur Chiron but only a bow and a lyre. With so many opportunities for trifling, it is not a little to the credit of the greater medallists that they contrive to give dignity to their subje6ts. But whatever we may think of the fashion, there is no doubt of the importance which was attached to it in most quarters, and of its significance in regard to Italian charadler. One of the most attraftive personalities of the fifteenth century, Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Naples, had his imprese like any one else; the open book, for instance, with the in- scription "Vir sapiens dominabitur astris" duly appears on one of his medals, although not as the design of a reverse. For the reverses of Alfonso's medals, Pisanello seems to turn to subjects more worthy of a great king than a mere riddling device ; and yet they are striftly personal to him. The alle- gory of magnanimity (the eagle with the lesser birds of prey), the design of the young king hunting the boar, and the triumphal chariot, commemorating his entry into Naples, are three reverses which seem to tell us more about the per- sonality of Alfonso than pages of Beccadelli or Facio, and nearly as much as the portraits to which they are attached. But Pisanello stands alone, and there was a whole school of medallists — the most important, indeed, after himself — which rejefted his example, in so far as they were content to dispense with reverses, or to use a banal type which was worse than none. These were the Florentines of the last third of the fifteenth century, of whom Niccolb di Forzore Spinelli, called Niccolo Fiorentino, was the greatest — so far the greatest that one critic has taken the bold step of attri- buting to him praftically all the Florentine medals, good, bad, and indifferent, produced in the period during which he may have been working. Now these Florentines were simply shameless in the matter of reverses. They recognized indeed that a medal was not fully a medal if it had no reverse. MAKE-SHIFT REVERSES ii But they took no trouble to harmonize the two sides. The same reverse — say of Fortune passing over the w^aves, or of Hope, or a merely decorative design of an eagle perched on a tree — was employed indifferently, sometimes with an at- tempt at appropriate modification, but more often unaltered, for the portraits of all sorts of people. The ideas for the designs were borrowed from various sources. One favourite reverse is copied from the Sienese antique group of the three Graces. Another — this is on a medal of Alfonso d'Este signed by Niccolo Spinelli himself — shows a group of horses, from Athenion's gem of Jupiter thundering against the giants, attached to an absurd triumphal car. Donatello's Diomede — itself a loan from the antique — was made to do service in the same way, and the reverse of a coin com- memorating Trajan's subjeftion of Armenia and Mesopo- tamia was pressed, apparently by Bertoldo di Giovanni, into the service of Lorenzo de' Medici ! Now no sensible critic complains of an artist for borrowing ideas ; the only ground for criticism lies in the way he uses his loan. If he makes no attempt to adapt it and give it a new meaning in consonance with its new setting, he cannot stand excused. And this kind of immoral plagiarism lies at the door of Niccolo Fiorentino and his school. The fadt doubtless was that they cared for nothing but the portrait-bust, and were lazy or incapable of designing appropriate reverses. But as their sitters wanted reverses, they were fobbed off with these miserable make- shifts. When, as in the case of Niccolb's medal of Lorenzo de' Medici, he was evidently not allowed to use one of his cliches, he produced a clumsy, almost schoolboyish, affair like the figure of Florentia. Were it not for the badness of such designs as are certainly from his own hand, one would say that he left it to his garzoni to make up the reverses to please his customers. In spite of all this, the obverses, regarded as mere portraits, strike or charm so effedlively that one forgets all other faults in sheer admiration for the Florentine's directness and sin- cerity. It is a wonderful gallery of heads, fit to be placed 12 SPERANDIO alongside of the best Florentine painted portraits of the period. The Veronese and the Florentine are the two great schools of medallic portraiture of the fifteenth century. In saying this I am not forgetting Sperandio of Mantua, who may be re- garded as the chief master of the Bolognese school. Sperandio is a tyrant or a Cleon, "the most violent of the citizens" of the republic of art, and the position of popularity which he once held, but from which he is now happily deposed, was in a great degree due to bluster. There was among the Italians, as I have hinted above, a considerable market for works which substituted swagger for dignity, and staginess for emotion. Sperandio used his undoubted talent and power of superficial chara6terization to please his public in the easiest possible way. He was not the man to restrain him- self and chasten his Muse, to use thought and selection in- stead of flinging his ideas, original or borrowed, in unrefined crudity on to his modelling-slate. Probably, also, his ideas would not have survived the trial as by fire to which real genius submits its conceptions before rendering them in their final form ; their emptiness would have stood revealed. With all his power, one feels that there is no real greatness within him ; his portraits are clever, but not intimate. It cannot surely be that all the men whom he portrayed were so uncouth and ungentlemanly as he would have us believe. Of course all portraits that are worth the name have a double interest, as revelations not only of the sitter, but of the artist. Sperandio's portraits certainly seem to reveal to us a good deal of the soul of the artist ; but whether it was greatly worth revealing is another matter. Portraits by Leonardo or Titian are even more valuable to us for what they tell us of Leonardo or Titian than for their presentment of the sitters: persons for the most part of infinitely less importance to the world, who attain value in so far as they are transmuted by the genius of the artist. Some Italian artists, I think, realized that the objeft of a portrait was not merely to " be like," to be at once recognizable by any one WHAT THE PORTRAIT REVEALS 13 superficially acquainted with the sitter. The very faft of a portrait being quite obviously true in this popular sense raises the suspicion that it must be merely skin-deep. That is where a painter like Frans Hals is shown to stand on a much lower plane than Titian or Velazquez. One cannot express the difference between the two points of view, the popular and the artistic, better than in the two couplets which are found, one on a Florentine, the other on a Venetian portrait. Ghirlandajo, most diredl and "commonsensical" of Florentines, paints a pretty profile of a girl, and adds Ars utinam mores animumque eiEngere posses ; Pulchrior in terris nulla tabella foret. Vettor Gambello, a Venetian modelling the portrait of Gentile Bellini (PL XX, No. 13), a man ten times greater in the public estimation than himself, has the assurance to say Gentili tribuit quod potuit viro Natura; hoc potuit Viftor et addidit. The Venetian would have scouted the idea that art could not express good charafter; at any rate, he would say, if such expression was not within its province, then it was absurd to suppose that the beauty of the picture could be improved thereby. And the Florentine would have been a little scandalized by the boast that the medallist had added to that beautv, with a full measure of which Nature had already endowed the sitter. And as for Gentile — we are not to suppose that his vanity would be wounded by being told that the portrait was "very flattering," for he, too, would understand the objedl of his art. But Ghirlandajo's objeft was to illustrate the outside, and not to reveal the inward- ness of things. No wonder he is charming and popular. In the art of the medal, as in other art, Rome of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is true to her traditional dependence on the antique, which seems to have sterilized her capacity for producing a native art. From all parts artists flock to Rome: Cristoforo Geremia from Mantua, and his nephew " Lysippus " ; Candida from Naples, Caradosso from Milan, Cellini from Florence, Cesati from distant Cyprus, H ROME AND VENICE and so on. Giancristoforo Romano is the only early medal- list of any note of Roman birth, and his style is not Roman, but rather Mantuan. The influence of the antique is strong on some of these men. Cristoforo Geremia's little medals of Paul II, though they do not aftually reproduce antique types, remind one of Roman sesterces; his medal of Augustus is frankly an attempt to "restore" the antique, and the reverse of his medal of Lodovico Scarampi is inspired by some Roman bas-relief. Lysippus (PI. XX, No. lo) and Candida shake themselves fairly clear from the incubus : the former learned little but his beautiful lettering from Roman inscriptions; the latter cared nothing for reverses, on w^hich Roman models might have exercised their influence. Cesati was, however, frankly a copyist of the antique ; and certain fancy portraits of persons mythicalor historical, such as Priam, Dido, Artemisia, and Alexander the Great, which have occasionally been as- cribed to that famous mystifier of colle6lors, Giovanni dal Cavino of Padua, are probably his work. Caradosso and Cellini, being rather goldsmiths than medallists, show com- paratively little trace of the prevalent tendency; though, as we know from Cellini's autobiography, he was quite competent to forge antiquities which deceived the amateurs of the time. And in Caradosso's curious medal of Bramante (PI. XXI, No. 17) one sees something like the form of the antique bust emerge; at any rate the idea is that of a piece of sculpture. The Veneto, too, had its share of the antique influence; from the medals of the Carrara, through Boldu (PI. XIX) and Guidizani, it may be traced, sometimes in the most naive manifestations, until with Gambello (PL XXI, No. 18) it be- gins to assume an academic phase. In faft, as soon as the artist begins to understand the antique, one of two things happens; either he ceases to reproduce it any more (and that is if he has the root of the matter in him) or else, having attained a fatal facility of technique, he adopts the antique rendering as a means of saving himself the trouble of thought and observa- tion; in other words, he becomes academic. There seems to be hardly any middle course. Fortunately, although a false THE STRUCK MEDAL 15 classicism does its best to spoil the medal, the Italians of the sixteenth century were children of too noble a tradition to submit wholly to its baneful force. Even at Padua, which produced the arid ineptitudes of Cavino, one finds, now and then, perfedtly charming reverses, like that of " Amicitia" on a medal of Francesco Comendone, inspired by the antique, but in no way stale or academic. Again, the medals which occupy the later plates in this volume will make it clear that there was no lack of artists, not merely well-known men like Leone Leoni or Trezzo or Antonio Abondio, but many others unknown to fame, who could produce brilliantly char- afterized portraits. The portrait, indeed, saved the medal from a too speedy decadence, such as is noticeable in the plaquette, which makes no pretence of studying a living person, and in which it is therefore easier for the artist to follow blindly the models of his school. The decay of the medal was assisted by another develop- ment which craftsmen like Cellini, so proud of their improve- ments on old methods, doubtless hailed as the greatest tech- nical advance of the age. A few bold spirits in the fifteenth century, such as Enzola of Parma, following the example of the artist of the Carrara medals of 1390, had attempted to employ engraved dies, and hammers or striking machinery for making medals. But the process of casting fortunately held its ground until the sixteenth century. By that time the machinery had been so greatly improved that many medallists began to employ it. Once the labour of engraving and punch- ing the dies was over, an indefinite number of specimens could be produced without the troublesome preparation of fresh moulds, and, more important still, without the subse- quent chasing which was necessary in almost every case to remove the imperfeftions left by the process of casting. The letter of Leone Leoni, of which the gist is given later in this volume where his medal of Michelangelo is described, shows that he, at any rate, did not chase more of his medals than he could help. The technique required for engraving a die was obviously 1 6 ENGRAVING AND CASTING quite different from that which was employed in making a model in soft material, from which a cast might be taken. The new technique was of course nearly the same as that of the coin-engraver ; but it is artistically more allied to the art of the engraver of precious stones. For the engraver of medal- dies either cuts and drills direft into the die — as if he were cutting a gem intaglio — or else, like a cameo-worker, he carves punches in steel, in relief, with which the die is after- wards punched. He differs from the mediaeval coin-engraver in that he works in higher relief But whatever be his tech- nical classification, he is working in hard material, which necessarily hampers him, making him pay more attention to finesse and minuteness of detail than if he were working in stuff which offered less resistance to his tool. Extreme finish on the one hand, dryness and hardness on the other, are the results. But the good, old-fashioned method of producing medals by casting from a wax-model gave every chance to the medallist of developing a large style, if he had it in him. With his soft wax on his bit of slate or board he could either build up his design — and that is what was usually done — or he could, as a practical medallist assures me Pisanello must have done, go to work like a sculptor, carving his design out of a mass of wax. It is true that the extreme plasticity of the medium led, after a time, to abuse. The development of the cast medal in Italy may, in faft, be divided into two stages. . In the first, the model exists only for the medal, and indeed dies to give it birth. The artist, modelling in wax, thinks all the time of the final result, which is to be in hard metal, which will not suggest its origin in so soft a material. He encloses his wax model in the moulding material, and melts it out, leaving a cavity into which he pours the lead or bronze. But in the second period, the model becomes an end in itself. Demoralized by the facility with which he could work in wax, the artist began to play tricks, to invent subtleties. Instead of sacrificing his model to the medal, he preserved it, repaired any damage it might have suffered in the process of moulding, and even coloured it or decorated it with extrane- THE WAX MODEL 7 ous ornaments, such as pearls. In the second half of the six- teenth century the cult of the wax-model was at its height. Of the kind of model which was used for the cire perdue process, and destroyed in casting, it would have been a mere accident had any been preserved. But of the models which were used in the later period, a fair number may yet be seen in various colledtions.^ Some of them are made of ordinary soft wax, fairly pure; but others were made of a harder material, such as Vasari tells us was used by Capocaccia of Ancona, a combination of wax, resin, and plaster. Such " stucco " would probably be required for work which was to be painted and adorned with jewels. This change in the attitude of many sixteenth-century medallists is very evident to the trained eye; one sees, for instance, that the medals of Pastorino or Ruspagiari or Antonio Abondio suggest the original wax much more forcibly than the works of Leone Leoni or Trezzo, who have kept more of the breadth and largeness, more of the sculpturesque quality of their pre- decessors. Thus, even among those who continued to cast medals instead of adopting the newfangled method of striking them, the inevitable decay set in; but it was slower with them. It is a mistake to say, as Fabriczy does, that about 1550 the cast medal had been almost entirely driven from the field. It really had another half century of vigorous life (and has in- deed never entirely died out), but it was outside of the Roman and Florentine courts, where the official struck medal, with all its dismal monotony, had firmly established itself. Pastorino of Siena — a facile, skilful, but somewhat superficial artist — went on working until 1579, perhaps later (for he lived until 1592). We have cast medals from the 1 I may refer to my article in the Burlington Magazine (April 1909, p. 31) on this subjedt, where other references will be found. I have there stated, but wrongly, as I now think, that the model of the (never executed) medal of Giacomo Negroboni, in Mr. Oppenheimer's colleflion, was intended for the cire perdue process. It must have been intended to be preserved. For other wax models see Menadier in Amtliche Berichte aus den kon. Kunstsammlungen (Berlin), 1910, p. 314. D 1 8 CONDITIONS OF RELIEF hands of Pier Paolo Galeotti (died 1584), Jacopo da Trezzo (died 1587), Leone Leoni (died 1590), Antonio Abondio (died 1 591), Alessandro Vittoria (died 1608), and Lodovico Leoni (died 1 6 1 2) ; and these are, we may fairly say, some of the best medallists of their time. Those who think of this period as a time in which the struck medal was dominant have been oppressed by the dreary series of Papal and Medicean medals; quantity is certainly with them, but not quality. But what — to come to considerations more direftly pertin- ent to the objedt of this book — is the exadl value of medals for the study of portraiture? How far, in the first place, can we believe what they say, that they present the portrait of so and so; and again, how far do considerations of tech- nique and method limit the scope of their evidence ? The latter point, as the more easily settled, may be taken first: except in the matter of size, medals are governed by precisely the same limitations as any other sculpture in relief. The untrained eye and the sluggish imagination will always find difficulty in appreciating sculpture of any kind. And the difficulty is greater with sculpture in relief than with sculp- ture in the round, because the mind has in a great measure to supply to the relief the third dimension, which is only indicated conventionally, and not, as in painting, suggested by tones and other aids to optical illusion. But if sculpture in relief thus requires a more highly trained mind to understand its forms than sculpture in the round, or than painting, it is none the less effisftive as a representation of the artistic verities for those who understand; perhaps we may say that even be- cause of the difficulties over which both artist and spe6lator must triumph, if it is to succeed, it is the higher form of art. The impression made by it on the mind may be received with some difficulty, but it is all the more permanent. The limita- tions of the medal, therefore, as a relief, do not when pro- perly understood hamper its power of expression. It is true that successful portraits in relief are, with a very few excep- tions, confined to profile representations. Sperandio's portrait LIMITATIONS OF METHOD 19 of Francesco Sforza is not the kind of achievement that would tempt many other medallists to follow in his footsteps. Even the far more skilful Greek coin-engravers seldom attained a real success with the facing head ; we can count on our fin- gers the coins, such as Kimon's Arethusa and the Apollo of Amphipolis, which rank really high; and even some of these produce a certain feeling of uneasiness, as though all were not right with the method. The element of repose, which is essential to good sculpture, seems to escape from these otherwise brilliant creations. If the Greeks failed, the Italians — to whom sculpture was much less than painting the art of arts — were hardly likely to succeed. Limiting themselves, therefore, to the profile portrait, the medallists developed this to a high degree of excellence, attaining a charafter- ization as perfedl as was achieved by any sculptor in the round, though of a different kind. The limitation of the medal in size to something easily handled is a peculiarity which distinguishes it from other sculpture. It is a limitation which a6ls as a severe test of style; for work on a small scale tempts the artist to work in a small style, and the medal which, in spite of its small size, shows largeness of conception and treatment must be the work of a great artist. The majority of modern medallists seek to evade the difficulties which lie before them by design- ing on a large scale and reducing mechanically from their model to the size required for the final result. Nemesis fol- lows quickly on their laziness; for neither modelling nor design can be truly translated on to a smaller scale except by an intelligent hand. Intelligence and not a machine is re- quired to correft the false relations of masses and planes, which are created by the mechanical reducer. A medal produced in such a way is about as true to model as a cheap colour-process illustration is to the original pidture. Italian medallists often made smaller copies of their medals. One is glad to think that the machinery for reduftion had not been invented in their time. But what of the trustworthiness of the portrait medal? 20 NUMISMATIC EVIDENCE The student of ancient iconography would be sadly at a loss if it were not for the existence of coins. The coins, for instance, form the real basis of books like Bernoulli's work on Roman Iconography. Classical archaeology being a well- organized study, the student who has any sort of intelligence can easily find guides which will direft him to the best sources of evidence on any given subjeft. But, as M. Salomon Reinach complained in the preface to his Repertoire of Paintings, the study of Renaissance Art is not organized in this way, and it is easy to miss the road — not to fresh discovery, which is difficult anywhere, but — to the knowledge of what work has already been done. Thus, while ancient coins are now made fairly accessible — though much remains to be done — to the student of ancient art, the Italian medal remains neg- ledled by nearly all enquirers. It would be easy to give a dozen instances from comparatively recent years of ambitious books on Italian biography or history, which either make no use of the medals bearing on their subjedl, or use them in an unintelligent way. The latter is the more mischievous of the two errors ; it can do no good to the study of art or history when late sixteenth-century medals by Paladino are used to illustrate the history of fifteenth-century Popes, or pieces from the " galerie metallique " of some commercial medallist like Selvi or Soldani figure as evidence for portraits of the early Medici. These later "restitutions" are comparatively easy to detedl, and there is little excuse for any one with any pretension to scholarship being deceived by them. They have been pub- lished and described. But there is another class of false medals which have never been systematically coUedled and nailed to the counter. The medals of the Canacci family are typical of this class.^ One is made out of a medal by Lysippus of Giovanni Alvise Toscani ; another out of the medal of Louis ' This set was first exposed by M. H. de la Tour in the Revue Numlsmatique, 1 895, p. 460 ; 1 896, pp. 479 f. I have discussed it and others in the Burlington Magazine, OGt. 1909, p. 31 ; at that time I had not recognized the original of the false medal of Paolo Vettori. FAMILY FORGERIES 21 XII and Anne of Brittany; a third out of Pisanello's medal of Vittorino da Feltre. The method employed was simply to make a mould from the head on the original medal, alter- ing the inscription, and slightly modifying the bust also. These pieces are grotesquely bad in execution; it is almost incredible that they should ever deceive anybody with any experience. But they have done so. Another piece, which professes to represent Paolo Vettori,is made out of a medal, not even Italian, but Netherlandish, of the Englishman Richard Shelley, Grand Prior of the Knights of Malta. The most thorough piece of imposture of this kind, however, was per- petrated in connexion with a well-known Florentine family, whose name I suppress, since the photographs of this certainly unique collediion were communicated to me privately. The medals, of which there are some twenty-six, are with two exceptions all of the same quality and produced by the same method as the Canacci portraits mentioned above. The two exceptions are inferior casts of good medals, one of the school of Niccolo Fiorentino, the other sometimes, but without good grounds, attributed to Benvenuto Cellini. It is clear that at some time in the seventeenth century an unscrupulous person took advantage of the desire of people such as the members of the Canacci family to possess a gallery of medals of their ancestors; and perhaps — as we know has occurred in the case of painted family portraits — the family did not always enquire too curiously into the authenticity of his wares. Where the inscriptions naming the person are in relief, and there is no obvious incongruity in the appearance of the medal, one can only test authenticity by style. But when the inscription is in cava, that is to say engraved on the original model, or earlier specimen of the medal, from which the one in question is cast, that is enough to put us on our guard. For it is quite an easy thing, without altering the style of the medal, to chase away the inscription and engrave another in its place; and the harshness of the result may be softened by making a new cast from this altered piece. A good in- 22 BORROWED PORTRAITS stance of this kind of sham portrait is provided by a medal professing to represent the Ferrarese poet Antonio Tebaldeo, who was born in 1463. It is nothing else than a medal of Gianfrancesco Marascha, by Lysippus, on which the original raised inscription has been smoothed out and replaced by the engraved words anton' thebald'.^ Such pieces as this, where it is possible to recognize the original, are easily dealt with. Perhaps the best executed example of the class in which a new inscription and a new reverse type have been added in relief, is the medal of Antonio Salvalaglio. Who Antonio Salvalaglio was is not quite certain.^ But the medal which represents him has been madeout of another, cast by Petrocini, of Count Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, dating from the year 1460. The bust has been left exaftly as it was, but the inscription has been replaced in the most skilful manner by lettering which is in no way out of keeping with the original date of 1460. The reverse has been altogether altered; on the new medal a wingless two-legged dragon, with the inscription " A celo fortuna datur," has replaced the original signature of the artist, " Opus Petrocini de Florentia MccccLx." In the process, the diameter of the piece has been reduced by about -^ or y\-- The lettering and general exe- cution of the new piece are so satisfadlory, that it could al- most reasonably be maintained that it was done by Petrocini himself The question can hardly be settled until the identity of Antonio Salvalaglio has been satisfa6lorily established. But the fadt that one medal was made from the other is be- yond question. Enough has been said to show that any satisfactory use of the evidence of medals for portraiture must be accompanied with caution; and the experience which is necessary is not ' See Burlington Magazine, Aug. 1908, p. 278. ' Milanesi in Armand (iii, p. 184 a) says that he commanded the artillery of Sant' Angelo in 1527. M. E. Rodocanachi kindly informs me that he can trace no such person in such an office at the time of the siege; but a captain Francesco of Pistoia, called Salvalaglio, apparently in the service of the Colonna wfas hanged in Rome in 1528 (Dom. Orano, // Sacco di Roma, 1901, pp. 372 f.). MEDALS AND PAINTINGS 23 acquired except by the prolonged study of medals. A train- ing in the study of the larger forms of sculpture, for instance, is not sufficient, any more than a good judgement of the au- thenticity of Greek or Roman coins is to be expected from a person trained in ancient sculpture but not in numismatics. But with adequate safeguards it is infinitely more easy to de- cide on the authenticity and date of an Italian medal than on the date of a picture or a piece of sculpture. And when these points are once decided, we have a basis for the identification of a portrait as sure as any that is humanly possible. To see the place which a medal takes, when marshalling the evidence for the iconography of any particular person, we have only to consider, let us say, the portraits of Giovanni Bellini. The painted portrait in the Uffizi (PI. IV, at p. 39) has beneath it loANNES BELLiNvs. But who is to say, apart from the evi- dence of the medal (PI. XX, No. 14), whether that means that it is his portrait, or only that it is his work ? The por- trait of a young man at Liverpool has an equal claim, so far as the inscription on it goes, to represent Giovanni. In faft, inscriptions on paintings are the easiest of all pos- sible additions, and their evidence counts for nothing, ex- cept in so far as they show that some one believed, or wished to make the public believe, that a pifture was a portrait of such and such a man. But false inscriptions on medals, of a kind to deceive the expert, are the exception. The very modesty of the medal as a work of art, small and compara- tively insignificant in size, has been its proteftion. It has been necessary to deal at some length with this question, because certain medals which might have been illustrated in this book have been excluded on the ground of their being late "restitutions." The portrait of Cristoforo Sorte may be based on a sixteenth-century original; but the two specimens known to me are so roughly cast that it is hardly possible to decide; it has therefore been omitted. A restored medal of Bramante is discussed in the text. A medal of Jacopo Sansovino in the Correr Museum, with engraved inscription, may indeed represent him, but is hardly 24 THREE BOLOGNESE contemporary. Finally, three curious medals (PI. XXXII), representing Francesco Francia, Primaticcio, and Guercino, call for more particular notice here under the heading of forgeries. Of the two latter there are specimens in the British Museum.^ The medal of Guercino (1590-1666) has his bust, to the right, with the inscription Gio • fran • BARBiERi • PIT - D • IL • GVERCiNo {Pittore detto U Guercino). On the reverse are two objefts, apparently brushes, in saltire. The field of the obverse is stippled; and there is a granitura, as the Italians called the pearled border, consisting of rather large widely spaced " pearls," on both sides. Some seven or eight of the medals of the Florentine family mentioned above have a border treated in exaftly the same way. The medal of Primaticcio is inscribed Francesco primaticcio p-b- [Pittore Bolognese). The type of the reverse is an instrument resembling a netting needle (a modelling tool?). The field of the obverse is stippled as in the previous medal, and the same charafteristic form of border appears. These two medals, as any one will see who compares them, especially in regard to the reverses, are two of a series ; and the fadl that one of them is of Guercino shows that, at the earliest, neither can have been made until the seventeenth century was well advanced. But there is, as I have said, a third Bolognese painter who appears in this gallery. Like the others, the medal of Francia has the artist's name in Italian (fran • FRANCIA • PIT • bolognese) instead of in Latin which, though by no means de rigueur, is yet more usual in Francia's time. The surface of this obverse is not stippled, like those of the other medals. But on the reverse we have the same tell-tale border; and the stops in the obverse inscriptions on all three medals are represented by small pits, instead of by raised points. The other reverses are poverty-stricken enough. This reverse has no type at all, but an inscription vivos dvcit vvLTvs. If these three reverses are laid side by side it is absolutely clear that they belong to the same period. The ^ They were presented by the late Mr. Max Rosenheim, who saw their importance as documents in connexion with this question of forgeries. A FALSE FRANCIA 25 "portrait" of Francia is grotesquely bad in execution; and it is doubtful whether the dress which he is made to wear is correft for his time. The bungler who perpetrated this work was probably making an attempt to translate into a profile portrait some such engraving as the illustration to the second edition of Vasari's Lives. The portrait of Primaticcio in the same book is even closer to the medal. And the medal of Guercino is, almost certainly, based on Ottavio Leoni's portrait. But whatever the sources, I feel confident that no expert judge of Italian medals, who sees the three pieces together, will have the slightest hesitation in saying that they are of the same date, and that not much before 1650 at the earliest. DESCRIPTION OF THE MEDALS DESCRIPTION OF THE MEDALS LEONE BATTISTA ALBERTI L Obv. Bust to left, with short curly hair, wearing drapery loosely knotted in front ; below the chin, a dissefted human eye with wings ; behind : L(eo) BAp(tista) (similar dissefted eyes being used as stops). Without reverse. Colle£tion of M. Gustave Dreyfus, Paris. Dimensions, 200 X 135 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XVI.] 2. Obv. Bust to left, with short hair, loose drapery round neck. No inscription. Without reverse. Louvre. Dimensions, 155 x 115 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PL XVII.] 3. Obv. Bust to right, undraped, with short hair, wearing fillet or wreath. Rev. Within laurel- wreath : leo • | bapt | ista • [ • AL(berti) in four lines. Bibliothdque Nationale, Paris. Dimensions, 36 X 27 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XVII.] 4. Obv. Bust to left, wearing close-fitting dress ; inscrip- tion : • LEO BAPTISTA • ALBERTVS • Rev. A winged human eye and the motto • qvid • tvm ■ in a wreath of laurel, around which the inscription : mat- THAEI • PASTII • VERONENSIS • OPVS • British Museum. Diameter, 92.5 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XVIIL] Leone Battista Alberti was born at Genoa on 18 Feb. 1404, and died at Rome shortly before 25 Apr. 1472. Of these four portraits of this universal genius, the fourth is by the Veronese medallist Matteo de' Pasti; the other 29 30 L. B. ALBERTI three have been attributed to Alberti himself, and also to Pisanello. For the latter attribution there is no sort of foundation ; the spirit and handling of the works is utterly different from anything signed by Pisanello. The attribution to Alberti himself has been described by Suida as quite arbitrary. It must of course remain conjeftural, unless a document is found. But quite unreasonable it is not, so far at least as regards the noble, forceful head on M. Dreyfus's plaque. Alberti is known from his own confession to have amused himself with the art of modelling.-'^ The treatment of the portrait is not free from a certain amateurishness (or, to be fair, a lack of familiarity with the precision of technique required by the medallist's art) ; and this might be expefted if Alberti were the author. On the other hand, the Louvre plaque — though so serious a critic as Cornelius von Fabriczy prefers it to the larger one — seems to show less understand- ing of the subjeft. The little oval medal is only represented by a not very good casting, so that it is difficult to judge of its merit. The obverse may possibly be taken from an en- graved gem. Alberti, on the Dreyfus plaque, is quite a young man, hardly more than thirty years old. We may, therefore, date the portrait about 1435, when Pisanello had not yet made a medal, so far as we know. Matteo di Andrea de' Pasti came into touch with Alberti at Rimini, where he settled in 1446, just about the time when Alberti was beginning the reconstrudlion of the Tempio Malatestiano ; and while Alberti was absent from Rimini Matteo superintended the work on the church, carrying out the master's instruftions. The medal probably dates from the year 1446 or soon after. It is reproduced on a large scale as a medallion above the tomb of Sigismondo Malatesta in the Tempio Malatestiano. The winged eye, which seems to be Alberti's impresa, or personal device, may perhaps have some reference to his ' We know also that he painted a portrait of himself (Vasari,ed. Milanesi, ii, p. 547). PISANELLO 31 experiments and discoveries in the science of optics. The significance of the motto "Quid turn?" is obscure. A. Armand, Les Medailleurs italiens, i, 23, 28-30. A. Heiss, Les Medailleurs de la Renaissance, L. B. Alberti, p. 14, Nos. 1-3, PI. I, II. G. F. Hill, Pisanello, 1905, p. 192. ANTONIO PISANO (PISANELLO) 5. Oku. Bust to left, wearing brocaded dress, and high, soft, crumpled cap; inscription: • pisanvs • • pictor • Kev. Within a conventional laurel-wreath, the letters •F-s-K-r-|-p-F-T- in two lines. British Museum. Diameter, 58 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XVIII.] 6. Obv. Bust to left, elderly. Inscription : pisanvs pictor Kev. Within conventional laurel-wreath, the letters F-s-K-i|p-F-T- in two lines separated by a laurel- branch. Berlin. Diameter, 34.5 mm. Bronze. Cast. [This specimen is without the reverse which is usually attached to this obverse.] [PI. XVIIL] We have two portraits of the founder of the medallic art. The earlier (No. 5) was in existence before 1443, when it was copied by Giovanni Badile in a fresco in S. Maria della Scala, Verona. Often attributed to Pisanello himself, it has none of the refined qualities of his work, nor does it show his method of treating relief, and it is more probably by some Ferrarese pupil. The letters on the reverse are the initials of the seven virtues. Fides, Spes, Karitas, lustitia, Patientia, Fortitudo, Temperantia. Quite apart from the quality of the work, the poverty of the reverse is enough to make it unlikely that it can be from the hand of the master, whose power lay in composing designs for reverses as much as in portraiture. The second medal (No. 6) is also frequently attributed to Pisanello. The faft that it repeats, with a very slight modi- 32 PISANELLO. AVERLINO fication, the reverse of its predecessor is, of course, no proof that both must be by the hand of one and the same medallist; but it is at any rate not an argument against a common origin, provided that the medallist to whom we attribute it was not, like Pisanello himself, fertile in the invention of reverse designs. It is highly unlikely that Pisanello would have repeated so poverty-stricken a composition; but a medallist disinclined or incompetent to design reverses might well have done so. I have suggested that a Ferrarese pupil may have made the medals ; and should like to go further, and suggest that they are the work of Antonio Marescotti. The smaller medal, in particular, bears a strong resemblance to the portrait of Antonio Marescotti (apparently a namesake of the artist), which bears the date 1444. I would date the earlier medal between 1440 and 1443. Pisanello did not go to Naples until 1448. The smaller medal may have been made in that year, or else three or four years later; for we know nothing of his movements after 1449, until his death in 1455. The smaller medal, it will be noticed, has a granitura, or border of "pearls" or dots. This is not used by Pisanello; but a little medal of Leonello d'Este, probably by the Ferrarese medallist "Nicholaus," on which Pisanello's sig- nature has been forged, shows it in a form similar to that which we find here. Armand, i, 9, 25, 26. G. F. Hill, Pisanello (1905), PI. 57. L. Simeoni in Nuovo Archivio Veneto, XIII (1907), p. 158. For Pisanello's name and date see G. Biadego in Atti del R. Inst. Veneto^ torn. 67 (1908). ANTONIO AVERLINO (FILARETE) 7. Obv. Bust to right, with hair cropped close, wearing close-fitting dress with narrow trimming of fur ; in front, a bee sucking a laurel (?) -flower ; behind and below, two more bees. Inscription, in cava : antonivs • averlinvs • archi- TECTVS ANTONIO AVERLINO (FILARETE) {Rome: S. Peters) AVERLINO. BOLDU 33 Rev. Averlino, wearing flat cap and short tunic, seated to right on a stool; he holds mallet and chisel, with which he is about to strike the trunk of a laurel-tree ; through a cleft is seen honey-comb, from which descends a stream of honey ; the air is full of bees ; above, the face of the sun shining. Inscription, in cavo : vt sol avget apes sic nobis comoda PRINCEPS Viftoria and Albert Museum. Dimensions, 80x68 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XVIII.] Of this medal of the eccentric Florentine bronze-caster only two specimens are known, the second being in the Museo Artistico Municipale, Milan. That it is the work of Filarete himself no one can doubt who compares it with the reliefs on the bronze doors of St. Peter's, from which his own portrait is reproduced in PI. I. He worked at Rome on these from 1443 to 1447, and was at Milan from 145 1 to 1465, when he is last heard of. The word "princeps" has suggested that the medal was made while the artist was in the service of the Duke of Milan ; and this is probable, although "princeps" might also be used of the Pope. Armand, i, 26. Lazzaroni e Munoz, Filarete (i 908), p. 227. GIOVANNI BOLDU 8. 06v. Bust to left, wearing tall soft felt cap and dress with pleated front; the hair plastered so as to stand out from nape of neck. Inscription in modern Greek and He- brew words alternating: +IWANHC T'^f MnwANTOV K^'V'JIO zwrpA$ov n'^n pnv. Rev. Nude male figure, with curly hair (the artist?), seated to left, pensive, resting his head on his right hand; on the ground, beside him, a death's head ; before him, on left, a winged draped female figure to right, holding long ribands and a chalice, on which shine the sun's rays ; behind him, an old w^oman wearing a cap, who lays a scourge 34 BOLDU about his shoulders; below, in sunk band, mcccc°lviii- Inscription : • opvs • ioanis ■ boldv • pictoris veneti • Berlin. Diameter, 87 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XIX.] 9. Obv. Bust to left, undraped, with short hair, crowned with ivy. Inscription : +icoANHC • MnwANTOV zwrPA^ov • BGNAITIA • Rev. Young man (the artist.?), nude, seated to right on rock, his face buried in his hands ; on right, a large nude winged putto (genius of death), seated on ground, with eyes closed, holding in left a flame, right elbow resting on a skull ; on the ground, a bone ; below, in sunk space, • M • cccc • Lviii • . Inscription: -opvs -ioanis -boldv -pictoris • VENETVS • XOGRAFI - Vi£loria and Albert Museum. Diameter, 84 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XIX.] These are interesting portraits of a curious and attradlive, if somewhat pedantic artist. He afFefts learning, signing his name in three languages. The Hebrew inscription is to be transliterated: yochanan boldu m® veneziya zayyar, i.e., "Giovanni Boldu of Venice, painter," which is also the sense of the Greek and Latin signatures. On the second medal, besides committing a solecism (Venetus for Veneti) he repeats the sense of Piftoris in Xografi, which is a faulty Latinization of the Greek word ; and in both the Greek signatures he has allowed the termination of his name in -ou to attraft the word for "painter" into the genitive, when it ought to stand in the nominative. These unfortu- nate attempts at a display of scholarship may, it has been suggested, have been prompted by acquaintance with some scholars of neighbouring Padua; but it is surely more likely that the medallist was imitating and trying to outdo Pisa- nello's signature on the medal of John Palaeologus, and did not really enjoy the confidence of any such scholars. On the reverse of the first of the two medals, the artist is apparently being afflidled by Penitence, while Faith or Religion comforts him. The other reverse type is a memento BOLDU. LYSIPPUS 35 mori subjeft to which there are many analogies; a discussion of them will be found in Dr. F. Parkes Weber's AspeSls of Death in Art, p. 65 f. It is possible that the second reverse was not adlually made for this particular obverse, the true dimensions of the two sides being different. Of Boldu little is known except what his medals tell us ; but we learn from documents that his father was one Pasqua- lino, that he was working in Venice from 1454 to 1475, and that he died before 1 1 061. 1 477. None of his paintings is identified. He was certainly inspired by Pisanello, witness his method of signing himself, his use of sunk panels for part of the inscription or date, and other little tricks. He studied the remains of antiquity accessible to him, and borrowed motives from them ; and his style has a curiously dry and wiry quality which may be due to an attempt to acquire the technical finish of ancient gems and coins. The two portraits both show classical influence ; and his liking for the nude is probably due to the same cause. He is fond of ligatured letters in his inscriptions, and in this follows the fashion of the Venetian painters. His medals bear dates 1457, ^45^' ^^^ 1466. FriedlSnder, Die ital, Schaumiinzen (1882), p. 85. Armand, i, 36, i and 2. LYSIPPUS JUNIOR 10. Obv. Bust of Lysippus to left, with curly hair, wear- ing cap with edge doubled up, and clerical dress ; below, two leaves on a stalk. Inscription : di la il bel viso • e qvi il Tvo servo mira Without reverse. British Museum. Diameter, 82*5 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XX.] This is, within its limits, one of the most admirable speci- mens of the medallist's art ; entirely free from afFedtation of any kind, it has, though it does not go very deep, much of the charm of the best Florentine painted portraits of the 36 LYSIPPUS later quattrocento. It is, however, the work of a Roman medallist, to whom a goodly number of medals can be attri- buted, but of whom little else is known, save that he called himself Lysippus the Younger, was the nephew of the medaUist Cristoforo Geremia, and worked at the Papal Court in the time of Sixtus IV, and perhaps of Innocent VIII. He occupied himself chiefly with the portraying of officials of the curia and other Romans, many of them quite obscure. His only dated medals are of 1478. The two (poplar?) leaves on a stalk are found, apparently as a sort of mark, on four or five of his medals. This one, though otherwise un- signed, is undoubtedly the finest of all the works that can be attributed to him. That it represents himself is, though not absolutely certain, highly probable. For the inscription (which reads as an ordinary pentameter) is to be interpreted : This side the likeness of your slave displays ; Turn me, your own fair face will meet your gaze. It is to be assumed that the reverse of the medal was to be polished, and serve as a mirror; the head on the obverse is the portrait of the person who presents the medal. Now — although, as I have indicated above, this does not absolutely follow — it is not unreasonable to assume that Lysippus adopted this pleasing method of presenting his own portrait to a friend. The presumption in favour of this interpretation seems strong enough to warrant the inclusion of the charm- ing piece among the portraits of artists. Armand, ii, 78, 23. Burlington Magazine, Aug. 1908, p. 274. GIOVANNI CANDIDA 11. Obv. Youthful bust to right. Inscription: ioannes CANDIDA Without reverse. Este Museum, Modena. Diameter, 34 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XX.] CANDIDA 37 12. Obv. Bust to left, in cap and close-fitting dress. In- scription : lOHANNIS CANDIDA Without reverse. Colleftion ofM. Gustave Dreyfus, Paris. Dimensions, 58x48 mm. Cast. [PI. XX.] On the first of these two attradtive portraits Candida is a boy of seventeen or eighteen ; on the second he is probably nearer twenty, if not beyond that age. The second portrait shows some resemblance in style to the work of Lysippus, the Roman medallist to whom Candida owed a good deal ; but (be it said without contradiftion of what is written above on No. i o) it is finer, more sympathetic and poetical, than anything that can with certainty be given to Lysippus. The smaller medal has also been attributed to Lysippus; but in its low relief and delicate execution it differs widely from his style. Nor does a study of the medals made by Candida himself reveal adequate reason for supposing that he made either of the pieces. By origin a Neapolitan of the house of Filangieri, Candida was not merely a medallist, but played a considerable part as diplomatist towards the end of the fifteenth century, serving as ambassador to Rome from the French court, and holding the position of councillor to the French king. His work as a medallist includes portraits of Fran9ois I as Due de Valois, of Louise de Savoie and of Marguerite de Valois, although some French authorities claim these as the work of an unknown French medallist. Whether they are right or not, there can be no doubt that he was the founder of the medallic art in France. Candida must have been born before 1 450, and died after 1504. Armand, ii, 85, 9. Le Gallerie Nazion. ItaL, i (1894), p. 52, PI. XII, 4. De la Tour in Revue Numismatique, 1894 and 1895. Burlington Magazine, Aug. 1908, p. 279. 38 GENTILE BELLINI GENTILE BELLINI 13. Obv. Bust of Gentile to left, with long hair, wearing plain cap, close-fitting dress, and chain with badge. Inscrip- tion : GENTILIS BELINVS VENETVS • EQVES COMESQj[ue) • Rev. Inscription in five lines : gentili • tribvit • | qvod • POTVIT • VIRO • I NATVRA • HOC • PO | TVIT • VICTOR • | ET • ADDIDIT • Colleftion of Mr. Henry Oppenheimer. Diameter, 64 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XX.] This medal must date after 1480, since Gentile holds the titles of Knight and Count, which he received from the Sultan Muhammad II. Eques (auratus) appears to be equivalent to Bey, and Comes (palatinus) means that he was attached to the imperial household. The chain which he wears is doubtless the decoration belonging to one of these titles. He returned from Constantinople at the end of 1480. But the medal cannot be much later than that year, since, born about 1429, Gentile was then fifty years of age; on this medal he hardly looks older. The high-sounding couplet on the reverse says, that Nature gave to Gentile "all that she could give to a man; equal gifts and more did Vidlor give to him. Viftor is Vettor Gambello, the artist whose own portrait of himself is given in No. 18. Good specimens of this medal are rare. Besides that which is illustrated here, one is in the Museo Correr at Venice, another in the Goethe Collection at Weimar. An inferior specimen in the British Museum has for reverse a cast from a plaquette by Fra Antonio da Brescia, of Apollo and the dead python. The medal should be compared with the marble relief (PI. II) in the collection of M. Gustave Dreyfus representing the artist, and also with the splendid drawing in the Christ Church collection (PI. Ill) which Sir Sidney Colvin has pub- PLATE II GENTILE BELLINI {Dreyfus Collection) PLATE III „ i^.»(i.» ?js * • ^ t « » •. « ,-jv. Within a circle of fetters, bust of Leone Leoni to right, with moustache and slight chin-beard, wearing a cloak; behind, a galley, with an anchor (under the bust) attached to it by a cable; also, apparently attached by a chain to Leone's neck, a block with two openings, and a hammer. No inscription. Rev. Bust of Andrea Doria to right, with long beard, wearing cloak over cuirass; behind, a trident; below, a dolphin. Inscription: andreas doria p(ater) • p(atriae) • British Museum. Diameter, 42-5 mm. Bronze. Struck. [PL XXIV.] 31. Oi>v. Bust of Leone Leoni to right, bearded, cloak ^ De mon. Ital., part iii, p. 36 of last seftion. I understand that the medal is not now in the Brera. ^ Cf. Milanesi's Fasari, vii, 567 note i. (The same pidture mentioned in an eighteenth-century inventory of the Farnese Gallery at Parma.) This pic- ture has been attributed to Jacopo Bassano, but Justi {Zeitschr. fur hild. Kunst, N. F. viii, 1897, p. 181) says that it bears il Greco's signature. The portrait is repeated in a group with Titian, Michelangelo, and il Greco himself in the pifture of the Purification of the Temple in the Earl of Yarborough's collec- tion {op. cit., p. 183). " G. C. Williamson, Portrait Miniatures, Vol. II, pi. 98, 4. 54 LEONE LEONI fastened on right shoulder. Inscription: leo • aretinvs • SCVLPTOR • CAES[aRe]vS • Without reverse. Ambrosian Library(?), Milan. Diameter, 59mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXIV.] The career of the sculptor and medallist Leone Leoni of Arezzo seems in some respefts to have resembled that of his rival Benvenuto Cellini (whom he succeeded in getting into prison in 1538). He was born about 1509, probably at Arezzo, rather than Menaggio, as some suppose. The first of the two medals, No. 30, which is certainly from his own hand, commemorates an interesting episode in his life. In 1540 he was sent to the galleys for a violent assault on the Pope's jeweller, a German goldsmith named Pellegrino di Leuti (Valdinero or Waldener). But the great Genoese Doge, Andrea Doria, interested himself in his case and procured his liberation. Accordingly in 1541, while at Genoa, Leone made the medal which represents his patron and himself, placing around his own portrait the chains from which he had been released. Some have discerned behind the head of Leone on this medal not merely the galley, but a little boat rowing away from it. I confess that I can see no signs of this. Such a subjeft, indeed, forms the type of another reverse which Leone made for Doria's portrait, and which is supposed also to allude to his deliverance from the galleys. I cannot explain the block, pierced with two redlangular openings. Have it and the hammer some connexion with the fetters; or is it some kind of tackle-block? ^ The second medal, which represents the artist with the title of Sculptor to the Emperor, may coincide in date with the patent of nobility which he received from Charles V on 2nd Nov. 1 549, when he was about forty years old. This ' Mr. Cecil Torr calls my attention to a passage in Pantero Pantera's work on the Galleys {V Armata Navale, cap. xiii), which shows that the rowers on the ninth bench had the duty of hoisting the carnara, a kind of heavy loading tackle. PLATE VII BANDINELLI. CAMPI 55 medal is confidently attributed by Armand and Plon to Leone's own hand. The only known specimen is said to have been in the Ambrosiana at the time of its publication by Casati^ and Plon, i.e. up to 1887; but recent enquiry has failed to discover it in that colleftion. Armand, i, 164, 8, iii, 68 i, 73 S. E. Plon, Leone Leant, etc., p. 256. BACCIO BANDINELLI 32. Oi>v. Bust to right, with short curly hair and long beard ; on truncation of arm, leo. Inscription : • bacivs : ban (dinellus) ■ scvlp (tor) - flo (rentinus) • Rev. Within a laurel wreath, chandor | illesvs, Berlin. Diameter, 39 mm. Bronze. Struck. [PI. XXIV.] This medal is signed by Leone Leoni (see No. 30). Bartolommeo Bandinelli was born at Florence on 1 2 Nov. 1493, ^^^ ^^^^ ^'^ 2 Feb. 1560. Fischel, in Thieme's Lexikon, enumerates the following portraits of him, besides the medal: the painting in the Uflizi, attributed to his own hand ; the engraving in Vasari ; a marble relief in the Opera del Duomo ; a terra-cotta sketch connected with the same at Berlin; a portrait attributed to Sebastiano or Salviati in Mrs. Gardner's collection at Boston. To these we may add a drawing in the British Museum which has been attributed to Francesco di Girolamo Pratense. The portraits at Berlin and in the Opera del Duomo at Florence are figured in PI. VII. Armand, i, 163, 4. GIULIO CAMPI 33. Obv. Bust to left, undraped, with short hair and beard. Inscription: ivlivs campvs CRE(monensis) • pictor ' Leone Leoni e G. P. Lomazzo (1884). 56 CAMPI. TITIAN Rev. Within a laurel wreath, a vase ornamented with two masks and a garland. Inscription: atpo nos Berlin. Diameter, 40 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXIV.] Giulio was the eldest of the three painter sons of the painter Galeazzo Campi of Cremona, He was born about 1502, and died in 1572. On the reverse of this medal, Atropos appears to be used generically, the vase representing the urn of Fate. Striftly, the emblem of Atropos should be the shears with which she " slits the thin-spun life." The medal is unsigned, and no attribution has been sug- gested. Armand ii, 207, 22. TITIAN 34. Oiv. Bust to left, with forked beard, head swathed, wearing cloak. Inscription : titi anvs : pictor et : eqves : c(ad- urcensis) : Without reverse. Berlin (from the Lanna Colleftion). Diameter, 34 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PL XXIV.] 35. Obv. Bust to left, bearded, wearing a cap on the back of his head. Inscription: titianvs eqves Without reverse. British Museum. Diameter, 39-5 mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXIV.] The first of these medals of Titian, though unsigned, is generally accepted as the work of Leone Leoni; Armand even places it among the medals of the authorship of which there is no doubt. It must be admitted that it shows small resemblance in style to any authenticated piece by that medallist. The reverse (a Bacchante) which is sometimes found attached to this portrait does not seem to have been originally made for it. The second medal is with much more plausibility attri- PLATE VIII TITIAN (iladrid: Prado) PLATE IX OH. Ftacco TITIAN (Stockholm) FRANCESCO DA SANGALLO ^-j buted to Pastorino of Siena. It is in a style which, so far as Pastorino is concerned, is discarded about 1554, and we may date it about 1540-50, when Titian was from sixty-three to seventy-three years old. On the other medal, he appears considerably more aged, and it can hardly be earlier than about 1560-70. There exists a third medal of Titian, not included by Armand among sixteenth century medals, and probably with good reason. But whatever its date, it is a poor and lifeless portrait. Specimens are in the British Museum and at Vienna ; one is illustrated in the Tresor de Numismatique, Medailles Italiennes, ii, pi. 38, No. 1. For comparison, I reproduce first (PI. VIII) the noble portrait, by the master himself, which is in the Prado. This Ricketts dates about 1566 to 1570. Very interesting also, and but little known, is the portrait at Stockholm, by Orlando Fiacco (PI. IX). Fiacco was a portrait-painter of great repute in his time (about 1560), and there was a por- trait of Titian by him in the house of Giuseppe Caliari at Venice.^ Armand, i, 166, 21; 208, 122. Plon, Leone Leant, etc., p. 253. FRANCESCO DA SANGALLO 36. Obv. Bust to left, with long beard, head swathed, wearing embroidered dress over under-garment with lace collar; in cavo on the truncation, FAciEB(at). Inscription: FRANCESCO DA SANGALLO SCVLTORE ET ARCHITETTO FIOREN- (tino)- Rev. The Tower of Santa Croce at Florence ; on either side o I pv I s M ] • D • L 1 1 ; all in a heavy garland. British Museum. Diameter, 68-5 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXIV.] 37. Obv. Similar to preceding, the inscription slightly varied, and FACiEB(at) in cavo on the truncation. * I have to thank Dr. E. Steinmann for calling my attention to this pidlure. I 58 FR. DA SANGALLO. CASELLI Rev. Bust of Elena Marsupini left. Inscription: helena MARSVPINI CONSORTE FIOREN(tina) A(nno) M D LI • BibliothequeNationale, Paris. Diameter, 96 mm. Bronze. Cast. [Pl.XXV.] These thoroughly charadteristic portraits of Francesco di Giuliano da Sangallo are replicas on a small scale of the marble relief in the Church of S. Maria Primerana at Fiesole (PI. X) ; that portrait of himself was dedicated by the sculptor in 1 542. Of the two medallic portraits illustrated here, the former occurs with two reverses, the one described, and another representing a terminal statue of a man, whose hand caresses a dog (inscription dvrabo). Some specimens bear the date mdl in cava on the obverse. There are also two reverses to the larger portrait, one of the tower of Santa Croce, dated mdxxxxx ; the other of the artist's wife, Elena Marsupini, dated mdli, as described. Sangallo began work, on the tower of Santa Croce in 1549; the foundations were complete in August 1551 ; and Fran- cesco paid for receptacles for the medals which were to be placed in them. In 1854 these receptacles were found, con- taining medals of Cosimo I and also three medals of Francesco with the tower and two with the portrait of his wife. These specimens may be seen in the Museum of Santa Croce. Sangallo's coarse mannerism, amounting to brutality, is at its strongest in these vivid but unpleasant portraits. Armand, i, 158, 5-8. G. Clausse, Les San Gallo, iii, pp. i39fF., 217 ff. GIOVANNI BATTISTA CASELLI 38. Oifv. Bust to right, old and bald, classically draped; below, 1 55 1. Inscription: lo(annes) • baptista casellivs Rev. Atlas, nude, bearded, standing to front, holding up the globe on his left shoulder with both hands; on either side, a tree. Inscription: et nvll astringo et tvtto il MONDO ABRACCIO Colleftion of Mr. T. W. Greene. Diameter, 45*5 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PL XXV.] PLATE X r ElVCSvINTERCESSIDNE V i \lIB£RATV^ - . FRANd SANGALLIVS IvLI FILII CI VIS FLOR FACIE -AD'N^-AVD X XXXII.- j A:;'!.iri FRANCESCO DA SANGALLO (Fiesole: S. Maria Prbuerayta) PAROLARO. SOPH. ANGUSSOLA 59 Of this rare medal one other specimen has been published ; it is in the Brescia Museum. That the piece is from Caselli's own hand, we know from some verses of his in which he men- tions it. Born at Cremona, evidently before 1500, to judge from his age on this medal, he is said to have worked not only as medallist, but as sculptor and portrait-painter. The medal does not give a very high idea of his qualities as an artist. Armand, i, 177. Rizzini, Illustr. dei Civici Musei di Brescia, ii (1892), 253. FRANCESCO PAROLARO 38 bis. Obv. Bust to left, clothed ; on truncation [in cava) • P • 1553. Inscription: francisco parolaro a a • lxvi Without reverse. Museum, Reggio d'Emilia. Diameter, 50 mm. Bronze. Cast. Francesco (or Gianfrancesco) Parolaro, a metalworker and jeweller of Reggio d'Emilia, was born in 1487 and died after 9 July 1557. The signature • p • 1553 represents the medallist Pastorino of Siena, whom we know to have visited Reggio and worked there as engraver to the mint from the middle of 1553 to the middle of 1554. I have not been able to obtain a cast of a specimen of this medal sufficiently well preserved to be worth reproducing. Besides the specimen described, there is one in the Berlin Cabinet. Burlington Magazine, Sept. 1906, p. 412. Archivio Storico d'Arte, v, p. 36. SOPHONISBA ANGUSSOLA 39. Obv. Bust to left, wearing dress with open collar and puffed and slashed sleeves. Inscription: sophonisba-angvssola- AMILCARIS • FIL(ia) Without reverse. Formerly in the Butler Colleftion.' Diameter, 69 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXV.] ^ Sale Catalogue, Sotheby's, 191 1, lot 923. I do not know its present possessor, and must apologize for reproducing it without permission. 6o SOPH. ANGUSSOLA. MICHELANGELO Another specimen of this medal is in the Paris cabinet, but it is greatly altered for the worse by chasing. To judge from the apparent age of the sitter, who is still called " daughter of Amilcare," as if she had not yet made a great name for herself, the medal was probably cast about 1550- 1560. Sophonisba was the eldest and most distinguished of the six painter-daughters of Amilcare Anguisciola or Angussola of Cremona. She was born in 1527 and died after 1623, probably at Palermo, where Van Dyck saw and sketched her in that year. Sophonisba has left many representations of herself; be- sides the Uffizi portrait at the age of twenty, I may mention the attractive likeness in the Poldi Pezzoli Gallery at Milan (PI. XI). I am not sure that she is represented in the picture in the Borghese Gallery which is generally supposed to be her portrait. Armand, i, 207, 21. Fournier-Sarlov^ze in Revue de VArt ancien et moderne, v and vi. MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI 40. Obv. Bust to right, bearded, in loose cloak; on truncation, leo. Inscription: michaelangelvs • bonarrotvs- FLOR (entinus) • aet • s • ann 88 • Rev. A blind man, wearing cap, nude to waist, carrying staff and water-flask, and led to right by a dog. Inscription: DOCEBO • INIQVOS • v(ias) • T(uas) • ET • IMPII • AD • TE CONVER (tentur) • British Museum. Diameter, 59-5 mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXVI.] [This specimen is without the usual reverse.] This portrait, by Michelangelo's friend Leone Leoni, exists in a very large number of specimens, of varying excellence; it was evidently among the most popular of sixteenth century medals, combining as it did the representation of one of the PLATE XI SOPHONISBA ANGUSSOLA (Milan: Poldi PezzoH) A ndersoii MICHELANGELO 6i greatest of artists with the handiwork of one of the most skilful of Italian medallists. The iconography of Michelangelo is to be exhaustively treated by Dr. E. Steinmann in a forthcoming work, and it is therefore unnecessary to dwell on it here. An interesting and little-known engraving is, however, reproduced in PI. XII from the specimen in the British Museum. It has already been figured by Dr. Steinmann in his work on the Sixtine Chapel. It represents Michelangelo at the age of twenty- three. The composition recalls the engraving by Marcan- tonio which seems to have inspired the pifture by Paolo Veronese of the dream of St. Helena. Possibly Parmigianino may have been the source of both engravings.^ To return to Leone Leoni's medal: it should be compared with a wax model (PI. XXVI, No. 40/^), doubtless made for casting from, which seems to be from the hand of Leone Leoni, to whom an old label on the back attributes it. It is in the British Museum, and is a remarkably fine and characteristic piece of modelling, entirely worthy of Leone Leoni; it differs in many small details from the signed medal. The lead medal, in the collec- tion of Mr. Maurice Rosenheim, also illustrated in PI. XXVI, No. 40^, measures 48'5 x 37 mm. It seems to be from a quite different hand, and portrays the artist at an earlier age. The legend on the reverse of Leone Leoni's medal is from Psalm li, 13 (1, 1 5 in the Vulgate). I do not understand its application to the subjeft, which was suggested by Michel- angelo himself. The medal was modelled at Rome, and four casts, one chased and completed, were sent by the artist to Michelangelo with a letter dated 14 March 1 561. We infer from this that the artist was in the habit of issuing unfinished casts, which were doubtless afterwards chased by sometimes inferior hands. In this case he asks Michelangelo to keep the finished specimen and do what he likes with the rest. Armand, i, 163, 6. E. Plon, Leone Leoni, etc. (1887), p. 165. ^ The date 1522 on the engraving is an addition in ink. It may well, however, Mr. A. M. Hind informs me, represent the date about which the engraving was made. 62 LOMAZZO GIOVANNI PAOLO LOMAZZO 4L Obv. Bust to left, with short hair, and very slight beard and moustache; drapery knotted on left shoulder and leaving right shoulder bare. Inscription: lo(annes) • pavlvs LOMATIVS Rev. Mercury, w^ith caduceus, presenting Lomazzo (who advances with open hands) to Fortune (nude, moving to right on a globe, holding in both hands a veil which flies behind her). Inscription: vtrivsqve British Museum. Diameter, 50 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXVI.] 42. Obv. Bust of Lomazzo to right, with very slight beard and moustache; undraped. Inscription: 10 (annes) pavlvs lom- ATivs Pic(tor) AET(atis) AN(n)o and, in inner circle, xxiii - MDLXII - P • P • R Rev. A column among waves which break upon it ; on the right, a tree; in the background, a city. Inscription: VIRTVS FVLMINA AVARITIAE CONTEMNIT. Museo Artistico Municipale, Milan. Diameter, 46 mm. Cast. [PI. XXVI.] Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, best known as the author of a Treatise delF arte della Pittura and of the Idea del Tempio delta Pittura, was born 26 April 1538. It is conjeftured that he went to Rome before 1 564. At the age of thirty-two he became blind. He died 13 Feb. 1600. Both medals represent his curiously negroid features at about the same age, i.e., twenty-three. Some specimens of the former. No. 41, add the word Pic[tor] to the inscription. It is by Annibale Fontana, since it is alluded to in a sonnet by Lomazzo entitled " sopra una medaglia fatta da Annibale Fontana." The first four lines run: La Prudenza ch' insieme e la Fortuna A cui sto innanzi chin, sopri un roverso Por fei d'una medaglia, u con stil terso Un mi ritrasse per furor di luna. PLATE XII MifA^ Ange t>onarounutFlormttnus. '•\^%v Sculptor optimus anno .^tMis fue ■ zj . ^^-, MICHELANGELO (British Mnscum) LOMAZZO. GIR. FIGINO 63 This seems clearly to refer to the figure of Lomazzo bending before Fortune. The inscription " Utriusque " may refer to the identification of Good Luck with Prudence which the poet makes in the first line. I confess to being unable to understand the point of " per furor di luna." The remainder of the sonnet (which is reprinted from the Rime by Casati) seems not to bear upon the medal. This medal is the source of the engraving which adorns the various title-pages of the editions of the author's Trattato (Milan 1584) and Rime (Milan 1587). The second medal (of which there is another specimen at Brescia) is a good example of the work of Pier Paolo Galeotti, called il Romano. It was probably made at Florence, where Galeotti worked for the most part after 1550. It is evidently the piece mentioned, though not described, by Lomazzo in a sonnet which he sent with a specimen to Prospero Visconti [Rime, -p- ^SS)- As Annibale Fontana was a Milanese, it is possible that his medal was made at Milan, before Lomazzo went south. Lomazzo returned the compliment paid him by the two medallists by painting their portraits. Armand, i, 230, 15; 254, 2; iii, I2ifl. C. Casati, Leone Leoni . . . e Giov. Paolo Lomaz%o (Milan 1884). GIROLAMO FIGINO 43. Obv. Bust to left, bearded. Inscription: hieronimvs- FIGINVS - MDLXII Rev. Minerva, helmeted, standing to front, with spear and shield; at her feet, emblems of the arts (architeft's square, book of music, guitar, compasses, torso, viol). In- scription: OMNIS • IN HOC • SVM British Museum. Diameter, 37 mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXVL] Girolamo Figino, a Milanese painter and miniator, was a pupil of Lomazzo. The same portrait of him is found at- 64 RUSPAGIARI tached to a portrait of a relation, Jacopo Antonio, dated MDLv; but the best known member of the family was the portrait-painter Ambrogio Figino. The medal is unsigned, but in style it shows no small resemblance to the work of Galeotti ; and since a medal of Figino's master, Lomazzo, was made by him (see No. 42), we may perhaps venture on the attribution. Lomazzo, in one of his poems [Rime, 1587, p. 11 5) praises Girolamo's versatility : non senza lode a molta imprese Attende, pinge, suona, e in lira canta. The reverse of the medal illustrates these varied talents. Armand, iii, 251 D. ALFONSO RUSPAGIARI 44. Obv. Half-figure to front, the head turned to right ; he wears a garment of fine stuff, clasped on his breast with a lion's mask clasp ; the left arm is truncated, the right hand holds an instrument resembling a set of four small organ- pipes. Inscription: alf rvspagiarii regien and,' below, IDEM I A - R Without reverse. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Diameter, 78-5 mm. Cast. [PI. XXVII.] Alfonso di Tomaso Ruspagiari, a highly accomplished caster from wax, but not a great artist, was born at Reggio d'Emiliain 1 521. He played a prominent part in the affairs of his city, was made superintendent of the local mint in 1571 and died in the autumn of 1576. He delights in showing his virtuosity in the treatment of fine and much-folded drapery, rather hung about the body than worn ; the ladies whom he represents are all " drest about the head ^ . . . with em- broyderies, frizelings, and carcanets of pearles"; the busts are 1 Florio's Montaigne, I, xxv ; I have omitted a phrase which would cast an unwarrantable imputation on the charafter of Ruspagiari's sitters. ALESS. ARDENTI 65 supported on fantastic brackets, and the arms truncated as if they were carved in stone. These affedtations are hardly com- pensated by the extreme delicacy of his modelling in low relief Armand, i, p. 2i6, 3. A. Balletti, in Rassegna d'Arte, 1901, pp. 107 f.; 1904, pp. 44 f. ALESSANDRO ARDENTI 45. Obv. Bust seen from behind, with head to right, the right arm shown truncated (as in sculpture); wears mantle attachedby various clasps and straps. Inscription: ALEx(ander) ARDENTivs picT(or) ExiM(ius) and in smaller letters a-r Without reverse. British Museum. Diameter, 52*5 mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXVI.] Alessandro Ardenti of Faenza painted at Lucca (which still contains some of his piftures) and at Turin for the court of Savoy, in whose service he died in 1595. But this medal was probably made before he left his native province, that is probably before 1565, which is the date on one of his pi6lures at Lucca. The medal is a typical work of Alfonso Ruspagiari, whose own portrait of himself is given in No. 44. It occurs also with a reverse representing the sphere of Fortune, with one man mounting, the other descending, and the inscription ET ME.-^ This Alessandro Ardenti is apparently distinft from an- other person of the same name and period, who also painted in Lucca, and seems to have been a native of that city. Armand, i, 216, i. Burlington Magazine, Dec. 1907, 142. ^ So, and not et ma, as Armand gives it, should the inscription be read, M. de Foville informs me. K 66 ANDREA FOSCO ANDREA FOSCO 46. Obv. Half figure to left, with short curly beard, wear- ing doublet with high collar, before a table on which rests a small torso of a nude figure; he supports it with his right, and holds compasses in his left; behind the table, a pedestal (inscribed a • a) on which is a vase containing a rose- bush (?). Inscription: andreas fvschvs. Without reverse. Brera, Milan. Diameter, 130 mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXVII.] The subjeft of this rather pretentious portrait is described in a document of 1566 as the " eminent messer Andrea, son of the late messer Francesco Fosco of Faenza, at present living at Venice, an industrious sculptor in wood." Andrea was commissioned to provide the pala for the altar in the church of St. John Baptist at Latisana, which was put up on 21 June 1567. The painting [Baptism of Christ) was by Paolo Veronese. The medal is signed A • A, and has consequently been attributed to Antonio Abondio. It is however, distinctly inferior to Abondio's own work, and belongs rather to a small class of medals, mostly signed with the same letters A ■ A, and attributable, apparently, to some artist of the Emilia; for his subjects are nearly all natives of Faenza, Carpi, or Reggio. He shows the influence (though none of the refinement) of Ruspagiari, who made the medals of Alessandro Ardenti and himself (No. 44, 45), Since one of his subjefts is Agostino Ardenti of Faenza, it is not impossible that " A • A " is to be identified with one of these two members of the Ardenti family.^ Ambrosoli in Rivista Italiana di Numismatica, ii (1889), pp. 391 f. G. Cassi in Bollettino iT Arte, iv (19 10), pp. 481 fF. ^ See Burlington Magazine, Dec. 1907, pp. 141 f. PLATE XIII JACOPO SANSOVINO (Vejtzce: Seuiinario) PLATE XIV Tintoretto JACOPO SANSOVINO (Uffizi) JAC. SANSOVINO. REFATUS 67 JACOPO TATTI (called SANSOVINO) 47. Obv. Bust to right, with straggling forked beard, head swathed and covered with cap with back-flap turned down; wears cloak with broad fur collar; behind,L-L- Inscription: lACOBVS SANSOVINVS SCVLPTOR' ET ARCHITECT (us) Without reverse. Viftoria and Albert Museum. Diameter, 63 mm. Lead, Cast [PL XXVIII.] The signature on this rare medal denotes Lodovico Leoni, two of whose other works are dated 1566 and 1568. This portrait of the famous architeft and sculptor (who was born in i486 and died in 1570) may have been made about the same time, for it shows him at an advanced age. Another medal of Sansovino, represented by a single specimen in the Museo Correr, does not appear to me to be contemporary. Tintoretto's portrait in the Uffizi (PI. XIV), so expressive and so ugly, was painted when Sansovino was eighty-four. Another well-known portrait of the sculptor is the bust by Alessandro Vittoria in the Seminario at Venice (PI. XIII); but in this the sitter is considerably younger. Armand, i, 252, 7. TIMOTHEUS REFATUS 48. Obv. Bust to right, tonsured and bearded, in monastic habit; on the truncation, 1566. Inscription: • TiMOT(heus) • REFATVS • SVI - IPs(ius)- EFFIGIATOR • Rev. Arabian camel, lying down to left; beside it, two corded packages; in the background, trees. Inscription: ■ t • R NON ■ VLTRA - VIRES • British Museum. Diameter, 23 mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXVIIL] Nothing is known of this medallist except what his medals tell us, nor was his name known until the publication in 1902 of this apparently unique specimen of his own portrait. 68 BERN. CAMPI. VASARI showing him to have been a member of some religious order. There exist two other medals signed by him, both of Mantuan monks, Teodoro Qualla and Aurelio Piosna, made in the year 1562, Those medals are signed tim-r-m-f- and TIM REF • MANT • F •, showing that the artist too was a Mantuan. The device on the reverse is of course an allusion to the legend that the camel will not carry more than his just weight, or travel more than his just distance. Numismatic Chronicle, igo2, pp. 55-61. BERNARDINO CAMPI 49. Obv. Bust to left, bearded, wearing coat with small fur collar. Inscription: bernardinvs da campo • cremoneni sis • {sic). Rev. Fame, winged, wearing long tunic, standing to front on four crocodiles, blowing two trumpets. No inscription. British Museum. Diameter, 49*5 mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXVIII.] The painter Bernardino di Pietro Campi was a pupil first of his elder brother Giulio (see No. 33), then of Ippolito Costa in Mantua. He was born about 1522 at Cremona, and died between 1590 and 1595. The medal represents him at the age of about forty to fifty. It is a creditable piece of work, but unsigned and un- attributed. I am quite unable to explain the significance of the reptiles on which Fame stands, in the reverse design. Armand, ii, 264, 9. GIORGIO VASARI 50. Oh}. Bust to right, bearded, wearing doublet and gown; incised on the truncation, leo • Inscription: giorgivs • VASARVS • ARRETINVS • PICTOR • Without reverse. Berlin. Diameter, 60 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXVIII.] VASARI. PRIMAVERA 69 This medal, to judge from Vasari's appearance, which is that of an elderly man of about fifty-five to sixty, must have been made about 1570. None of Leone Leoni's dated medals, it is true, is later than 1563, but there is nothing to show that he gave up working as a medallist in that year. Plon, indeed, attributes the medal to 1557 or 1558, but gives no reason for his dating. Vasari's own portrait of himself in the Uffizi (PI. XV) seems to represent him at much the same age as the medal. Armand, i, 167, 22. Plon, Leone Leoni, p. 268. JACOPO PRIMAVERA 51. Obv. Bust to right, with moustache and " royale," wearing doublet buttoned down the front, with turn-down collar, and mantle knotted on right shoulder. Inscription: lACOBVS PRIMAVERA • AET(atis) • AN(no) • XXXVI Rev. Bust of Helena Nisselys to right, hair richly dressed, wearing large ruff and elaborately ornamented dress (on the arm a monogram of her husband's and her own initials) . In- scription: HELENA NISSELYS • AET(atis) • s(uac) • AN(no) • XVII Bibliotheque Nationale. Paris. Diameter, 64*5 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PL XXVIII.] Primavera was one of the Italian artists who colonized France in the second half of the sixteenth century, and most if not all of his medals were made there, so that he can hardly count as an Italian artist at all. Nothing is known about him, except that he must have been working from about 1568 to 1585; it is conjeftured that he may have been born about 1544. I think there is a v on the left of the monogram on the arm of Helen Nisselys, which would point to her having been the wife and not, as some have rather unnecessarily supposed, the mistress of the artist. Chabouillet, who characterizes the question as scabrous (perhaps a strong term considering the manners . of the time), speculates at luxurious length thereon; one cannot help being reminded 70 TREZZO of Friedlander's criticism that the authors of the Tre'sor de Numismatique detected a courtesan in every unknown female portrait. A. Chabouillet in Mem. de la Sac, arch, et hist, de POrUanais, xv (1876), pp. 197-258. Armand, i, 277, 15. F. MazeroUe, Les Midailleurs fran^ah (1902), i, pp. xc f. JACOPO DA TREZZO 52. Obv. Bust to left, bearded, wearing doublet with collar, and gown with fur collar. Inscription : i acobvs nizolla DE TRizziA MDLXxii • and in smaller letters in returning circle AN • AB • Kev. Vulcan, nude but for waist cloth, seated on his anvil, holding sledge-hammer, and resting his foot on bellows; he converses with Minerva, who stands holding olive-branch and resting on spear. Inscription : artibvs qvaesitA gloria Berlin. Diameter, 70 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXIX.] This is a good specimen of the delicate work of Antonio Abondio, illustrating his subtle modelling and careful differ- entiation of texture. Where was this medal cast.? Fabriczy makes a curious slip when he regards' it as a youthful work of the artist's, " in any case earlier than 1555, when he (Trezzo) went to the Netherlands and thence to Spain." It bears, as is plain, the date 1572. There is in fad: only one medal which seems to be attributable with any good reason to the period before Abondio went to work for the Austrian court — that of Niccolo Madruzzo.^ But we know as a fa6l that Abondio was in Spain from June 1571 to March 1572, and it is here that he must have met Trezzo. The medal of Trezzo does not necessarily therefore, as some have thought, indicate a connexion of Abondio with Milan. ' See Burlington Magazine, Dec. 1907, p. 141. PLATE XV TREZZO. FR. VOLTERRANO 71 Jacopo da Trezzo ^ was born about 1515 or 1520, and worked first in Milan. In 1555 he went to the Netherlands, and in 1559 to Spain, where he spent the rest of his life. He enjoyed a great reputation as a sculptor and an engraver of precious stones, in the machinery of which craft he made certain improvements. Morigia says that he discovered the secret of engraving diamonds; but Caradosso is also said to have possessed that art. He engraved on a diamond the coat of arms of Charles V. He was sent to England with Philip II on the occasion of the marriage with Mary Tudor, when he produced a fine medal with the portraits of the two sovereigns. Philip II employed him constantly; from Morigia it appears that he was on very familiar terms with his sovereign. He worked for seven years on the screen of the church of the Escorial, and made a custodia there of rock-crystal, jasper, and other precious stones. He was buried in the Carmelite church at Madrid. His occupation as an architeft is indicated on his medal by the square and compasses which lie at the feet of Vulcan. The portrait of Trezzo was painted by Bernardino Campi, but whether this is preserved I do not know. Morigia, La Nohilta di Milano (1595), p. 290. Armand, i, 273, 30. Fabriczy, Italian Medals^ p. 210. FRANCESCO VOLTERRANO 53. Obv. Bust to right, bearded, wearing ruff and gown. Inscription: franciscvs volateranvs - t - r - Kev. A hand holding a square and compasses. Inscription: si qvid valemvs Berlin. Diameter, 40 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXIX.] Francesco of Volterra, who began as a worker in wood- inlay, but afterwards took to architefture, and produced a number of indifferent buildings in Rome, is less famous than ^ The medal gives his surname as Nizolla; I do not know whether there is any other evidence for this fa6t. 72 DIANA SCULTORE his wife, Diana Scultore, whose portrait we have in No. 54 from the hand of the same medallist " T. R." Both pieces were probably made about the same time; and if so, not after 1 587, about which time Diana died. Francesco was working as late as 1 592, and died in 1 600. Now the only dated medals by " T. R. " are of 1570 and 1572, and most of his medals seem to belong to the seventies. Francesco looks, in his por- trait, fully sixty years old, and if we suppose that the medal was made some time in the seventies, that would make him live to eighty or ninety years. " T. R." is to be distinguished from Timotheus Refatus of Mantua, who sometimes uses the same abbreviated signature (see No. 48). Armand, i, 287, 2. Numismatic Chronicle^ 1902, p. 54 f. Another specimen of this medal, showing the signature more clearly than the one illustrated, has recently been acquired by the British Museum. DIANA SCULTORE 54. Obv. Bust of Diana Scultore to right, her head covered with a drapery. Inscription : diana mantvana ■ t ■ r • Rev. A right hand holding a burin, engraving on an oval copper-plate a figure of the Virgin and Child. Inscription: AES INCIDIMVS British Museum. Diameter, 40 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXIX.] Diana, daughter of Giov. Battista Scultore (sometimes called Ghisi), is said to have been born about 1537 at Mantua; she died after 1587. She was well known as an engraver of the school which her father founded, but of which Giorgio Ghisi was the chief representative. This charafteristic portrait is by the same medallist as the medal of Diana's husband, Francesco Volterrano (see No. 53). The design which the hand is engraving on the copper (aes for AERi !) vaguely resembles some of Diana's own designs, but with so common a subject it would be absurd to pretend to identify it. Armand, i, 287, 3. Numismatic Chronicle, igo2, p. 60. MISERONI 73 GIROLAMO MISERONI 55. Obv. Bust of Miseroni to left, bearded, wearing dress with falling collar. Inscription: ieronimvs miseronvs a 42 and below (?) bom Rev. In a landscape with trees, a female figure being changed into a tree; seated on the left, with right hand extended towards her, a satyr with a crook. Inscription: si DEVS PRO ME Parma. Diameter, 62 mm. Cast. [PI. XXIX.] Girolamo and Gasparo Miseroni (also written Misuroni and Misceroni) are mentioned by Vasari, in his life of Valerio Belli, as Milanese engravers. He praises among their works especially two tazze of crystal made for Cosimo I, and two vases of bloodstone and lapis-lazuli respecSively ; these are still in the UfRzi gem-room. There were many other artists of the name of Miseroni. Morigia tells us that Girolamo (who was a pupil of Trezzo) had three sons: Giovanni Ambrogio (who was working at least as early as 1589, when he engraved a ruby which was sent to Rudolph II) ; Ottavio (who was in the service of the same Emperor) ; and Giulio, who died in 1593. All three were crystal engravers. It has been said (by Sandrart) that Girolamo was himself employed by Rudolph II, but whether he aftually crossed the Alps, or only sent his produdlions, is not recorded. The Austrian archives contain many documents relating to various artists of the name of Miseroni, but this Girolamo does not, so far as I know, occur among them. For it would seem that he is quite a different person from the man of the same name who was Schatzmeister at Prague, and made an enormous table-piece comprising five crystal goblets, about two ells high. This is described as the work of Hieronymus Miseroni in an inventory of the imperial treasure-chamber in Vienna, dated 1677. This Miseroni has been identified with Vasari's; but the same inventory says that the artist's son was still L 74 FERABOSCO living in 1677, and the piece itself bears the name of Ferdinand III and the date 1653. Even if this date is not that of the original making of the piece, a man whose son was living in 1677 can hardly have been famous enough to have been mentioned by Vasari (whose second edition is dated 1568) or to have had a son who had attained some repute as an artist in 1589. Our medal can hardly be much later than 1575, for, though no signature is visible on the cast ^ from which this illustration is made, Armand dete6ted on the original at Parma the signature bom. This means Andrea Cambi, called il Bombarda, a Cremonese goldsmith and medallist who is known to have been working from about 1560 to i575- On the reverse is represented a metamorphosis; but whose? Neither Daphne nor Syrinx seems to be intended. Morigia, La Nobilta di Milano (1595), p. 291. Sandrart, Teutsche Academie (ed. 1774), vii, p. 377 f. Armand, iii, 96 F. Jahrb. d. Kunsthist. Sammlungen des allerh, Kaiserhauses, xx (1899), Urkunden, p. cxciii, f. 5 v. PIETRO FERABOSCO 56. Obv. Bust to right, with long beard, wearing small ruff. Inscription: pietro feraboscho s(acrae) • c(aesareae) • M(aiestatis) • ARCHiT(e6lus) • 1575 and below, an • ab Rev. An ox walking right, bearing a yoke; to right and left, trees (engraved). Inscription: vsqve qvo. Vienna. Diameter, 48 mm. Cast. [PI. XXIX.] Pietro Ferabosco (Petrus Ferrabosco de Layno as he is called in a document of 1556) was born in 15 12 or 15 13 and entered the service of the Austrian court in 1544 or 1 545 as architedl and engineer and also as painter. He served his masters faithfully until he was pensioned off in Dec. 1588. Ferdinand I knighted him in 1556. He was entrusted with ' Obtained for me with infinite pains by Commendatore Francesco Gnecchi, with the kind permission of the Director of the Parma Museum. ANTONIO ABONDIO 75 various important buildings and fortresses, such as the castle at Vienna. Chronology makes it impossible to identify him with the man of the same name, said to be a native of Lucca, who worked as a painter in Portugal as late as 1 6 1 6. Armand, i, 271, 18. Numerous documents published in the Urkunden of the Jahrb. d. Kunsthist. Sammlungen, Vienna; especially vol. v. No. 4287; XI, No. 6482; XV, Nos. 1 1665, 1 1667. ANTONIO ABONDIO THE YOUNGER 57. Obv. Bust of Abondio to left, bearded, with small ruff, doublet and gown. Inscription: -antonivs- -abbondio- Without reverse. British Museum. Diameter, 45 mm. Lead, Cast. [PI. XXIX.] Antonio Abondio the Younger was of Lombard, perhaps Milanese, origin. He was born in 1538 and died on 22 May 1 59 1. Best known as a medallist and modeller in wax, he also worked as a sculptor and painter. In or before 1566 he went to Austria, where he was employed by the court, and did more than any other Italian medallist to influence the style of the local artists. His portrait is known not only from this medal but from an engraving by Martin Rota, made in 1574 and representing him in his thirty-sixth year. The medal lacks the quality of Abondio's own work, which is always extremely accomplished. It is, therefore, probably from the hand of a pupil. A not unfavourable example of the master's own delicate charadterization is the portrait of the medallist Jacopo Nizolla da Trezzo (No. 52)- The portrait seems to represent a man of hardly more than forty years, and may therefore have been made about 1570-80. Armand, i, 267, i (the reading " Abbondius " is apparently an error). 76 FED. ZUCCHERO FEDERIGO ZUCCHERO 58. Obv. Bust to right, bearded, wearing rufF, doublet, and mantle over left shoulder; incised on the truncation, p • Inscription: federicvs zvccarvs • 1578 • Rev. Longitudinal seftion of the cupola of the Duomo at Florence. Inscription: TENP(ore) FRANc(isci) MED(icis) MAG(ni) DVX {sic) ETRVRI^ PINSIT British Museum. Diameter, 51 mm. Bronze, Cast. [PI. XXX.] 59. Obv. Bust to right, bearded, wearing ruff, doublet, mantle over left shoulder, and medallion on chain. Inscrip- tion: FEDERICVS ZVCHARVS Rev. The high altar of San Lorenzo in the Escorial. Inscription: philippo ii aram MAx(imam) in aede r^- LAVR(entii) MART(yris) picT(uris) exornat and across the field MD 88 British Museum. Diameter, 61-5 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXX.] These two medals represent Zucchero (who was born in 1542 or 1543) at an interval of ten years, the earlier (by Pastorino of Siena) at the age of about thirty-five. The reverse of the earlier describes him as the painter of the frescoes in the cupola of the Duomo at Florence, which Vasari had begun in 1572. The three hundred and more figures, with which he completed the defacement of Brunel- leschi's cupola, were, he boasted, over fifty feet high, and that of Lucifer so enormous that the others looked like infants beside it. The derision which these productions ex- cited at the time in the mind of competent critics did not, however, spoil the painter's market. Thus about 1586 he went to Spain, summoned by Philip II to decorate the church of San Lorenzo in the Escorial. Despite the fatt that Philip ' Is this R a mistake for B(eati)? It is so read by Armand, but the letter is clear on the British Museum specimen. VITTORIA Tj was so deeply disgusted with the result that he dismissed Zucchero with a solatium, and commissioned Pellegrino Tibaldi to repaint most of the pictures, the irrepressible artist had his work commemorated on the reverse of the second medal here illustrated. This representation of the high altar of San Lorenzo indicates in relief the sculptured portions of the retablo, viz., the Crucifixion at the top, with statues of St. Paul and St. Peter flanking it, and the niches with saints at the sides. The spaces occupied by the paintings are left blank in the medal. Possibly the medallist, whoever he was, saw in this vacancy a significance which would certainly not have been apparent to Zucchero himself. On this medal, he is wearing a medallion with a bust on it, which cannot be made out. It may be one of the two (a medal of Philip II in the style of Gianpaolo Poggini, and a medal of some cardinal) which he wears in his own portrait of himself, which is in the Uffizi (PI. XV). Armand, i, 210, 135; ii, 271, 25. ALESSANDRO VITTORIA 60. Obv, Bust to right, with short curly hair and beard, wearing mantle knotted on right shoulder over coat. Inscrip- tion: • ALEXANDER • VICTORIA - SCVLPTOR • Rev. See No. 61. British Museum. Diameter, 55 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXX.] This portrait of the celebrated Venetian sculptor is now, I believe, described and illustrated for the first time, although its existence was mentioned in print as early as the eighteenth century. It may with good reason be attributed to Vittoria's own hand, for it is closely allied in treatment to medals which are signed by or with more or less certainty attributed to him. Vittoria was born at Trent, and came to Venice in 1543. He became in sculpture the most important of Jacopo San- 78 INDIA. ALESS. ALLORI sovino's pupils, so far as output was concerned; but apart from some effeftive portrait-busts, his quality as a sculptor is not high. The bust of Jacopo Sansovino is characteristic of his style (see PI. XIII). BERNARDINO INDIA 61. Obv. See No. 60. Kev. Head to left, with short curly hair and beard, uri- draped. Inscription : bernardinvs ■ indivs • pictor • v (eron- ensis) • British Museum. Diameter, 55 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXX.] There can be little doubt that this rare medal is the work of the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria, whose own portrait serves as obverse (No. 60). Julius Friedlander's suggestion that it might be by Giulio della Torre is due to some extra- ordinary lapse of judgment, seeing that Giulio was not working after about 1540, while India belongs to the second half of the century. Friedlander only knew the medal from an eighteenth-century engraving. India was born about 1535 at Verona and worked chiefly in that city; there are pictures of his recorded with the dates 1579 and 1584. Armand, ii, 274, 5. Friedlander, p. 112, No. 20. ALESSANDRO ALLORI 62. Obv. Bust to right, with short beard, close-cropped hair,doublet and small ruff. Inscription: Alexander allorivs FLOR(entinus) ■ 1581 • Without reverse. British Museum. Diameter, 51 mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXX.] This medal, hitherto apparently unpublished, represents Allori at the age of about forty-six, since he was born in 1535. A portrait of Allori, said to have been painted by DOM. FONTANA 79 himself, is in the Uffizi, and represents a youth of about eighteen or nineteen years, facing; it is hardly possible to make a comparison with the profile portrait of the much older man on this medal. The medal is unsigned, but is fairly good Florentine work of the kind for which Pastorino of Siena set the fashion, though certainly not by him. DOMENICO FONTANA 63. Obv. Bust of Fontana to right, bearded, wearing doublet and ruff; on the truncation, m Inscription : dominicvs • FONTANA • AMELINO • NOVOCOMEN(sis) • AGRI • Rev. Obelisk; across the field, inscription: cesaris OBELISCVM MIRAE MAGNIT(udinis) ASPORTAVIT ATQVE IN FOR(o) D(ivi) PETRI FELICITER EREXIT AN(no) D(omini) MDLXXXVI British Museum. Diameter, 39 mm. Bronze. Struck. [PI. XXX.] 64. Obv. Bust of Fontana to right, bearded, wearing ruff, and chain with medallion. Inscription: ■ dominic(us) • fon- tana civ(is) • Ro(manus) • coM(es) • PALAT(inus) • et EQ(ues) AVR(atus) • Rev. Obelisk, Inscription: ex ■ NER(onis) cir(co) trans- TVLIT ET EREXIT IVSSV XYSTI QyiNT(i) PONT(ificis) OPT(imi) MAx(imi) and (in exergue) 1586 British Museum. Diameter, 38-5 mm. Bronze. Struck. [PI. XXX.] Both these medals are of the year 1586, in which the celebrated architedt Fontana erefted the first obelisk in the Piazza of St, Peter's; or, at any rate, that is the event which they commemorate. The second medal is unsigned; its author, whether he be Domenico Poggini, as Milanesi suggests, or some one else, is a much better medallist than "m," who signs No. 63, a dry and lifeless produ6lion. A portrait closely resembling that on No. 64, to make which, it would seem, the die of that medal had been re- 8o G. B. DELLA CROCE worked (and spoilt in the process), was afterwards used in combination with a reverse commemorating all the four obelisks, with which Fontana is associated, and dated 1589. The three other obelisks are those of the Lateran, of the Piazza del Popolo, and of S. Maria Maggiore. A very lengthy account of Fontana's career, especially in connexion with the obelisks, is given by J. A. F. Orbaan in his " Sixtine Rome " (1911)- Fontana's portrait, engraved in 1589 by Natale Bonifazio of Sebenico, appears as the title-page of his work on the transportation of the obelisk, printed in 1590. Armand, i, 293, i; ii, 263, 6, 7; iii, 296 a. GIOVANNI BATTISTA DELLA CROCE 65. Obv. Bust to left, bearded, wearing gown over doublet with falling collar. Inscription: lo(annes) • BAPT(ista) • A ■ CRVCE - MED(iolanensis) ■ SER(enissimi) • sAB(audiae) • D(ucis) ■ GEMMARIVS Without reverse. British Museum. 6i"5x5imm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXXI.] A very finished portrait of a Milanese jeweller of some repute in his time. He appears also to have worked as an architect. Morigia, writing in 1595, says that he had long served the Duke Emanuele Filiberto as jeweller, and was still the valued servant of the Duke Charles and his wife the Infanta Caterina. The same authority praises particularly a palace built by him just outside Turin. It seems probable that he made the body of the casket, now in the Escorial, which the Duchess of Savoy gave to the Infanta Isabella about 1592; but the rock-crystal plaques which decorate it are supposed to be the work of other artists. Gaetano Milanesi, quoted by Armand, suggests that the medal may be by Giambattista himself. There is no reason, so far as we know, why it should not; but the reason why LAV. FONTANA. ART. GENTILESCHI 8i it should, to wit the faft that Giambattista was a jeweller and goldsmith, is, if obvious, a little futile. A specimen of this medal at Vienna, to judge from the illustration in the Tresor de Numismatique, appears to be cast from the British Museum specimen here illustrated, since it seems to have exactly the same defeats, and the British Museum specimen is undoubtedly old. Paolo Morigia, La Nohilta di Milano (1595), p. 295. Tresor de Numis- matique, M^d. ital. (1834), ii, pi. 38, 5. Armand, ii, 173, i; iii, 232 a. BonnafFe in UJrt, vol. 43, pp. 170 f. LAVINIA FONTANA QQ. Obv. Bust to left, wearing coif with lappet, and stiff bodice. Inscription: lavinia fontana zappia pictrix • 161 1 and, on a label below, ant • casoni Kev. Lavinia seated working at an easel, her hair fluttering wildly. Inscription : per te stato gioioso mi mantene and, below, compasses and square. British Museum. Diameter, 67 mm. Lead. Cast. [PI. XXXI.] Lavinia, the daughter and pupil of Prospero Fontana, be- longs to the Bolognese Mannerists; and the absurd reverse of her medal, with its affeftation of fine frenzy, seems not out of keeping with that school. She was born in 1552, and worked for some time in Rome, where she married Zappi. She died in 16 12. Antonio Casoni, a medallist of no great merit, seems to have been working at Bologna as early as 1592. He died in 1634. ARTExMISIA GENTILESCHI 67. Obv. Bust to right, the hair tied with a riband at the back, wearing pearl necklace, and scarf over lace-edged bodice. Inscription: Artemisia Gentilesca Pictrix Cele- bris Without reverse. Berlin, Diameter, 54-5 mm. Bronze. Cast. [PI. XXXL] M 82 ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI Artemisia Gentileschi, the daughter and pupil of Orazio Lomi or Gentileschi of Pisa, was born in 1590^ and died in 1642. She worked long in Naples, but accompanied her father for a time to England. The medal, to judge by Artemisia's apparent age, must have been made about 1625-30. Her style was formed on Guido Reni and Domenichino. Lanzi praises her portraits more than her subjedt pi6lures. The likeness which we have of her suggests an enthusiastic, if somewhat untidy mind. It is an able and expressive portrait, but, so far as I know, has not been attributed to any known medallist. A painted portrait of herself is at Hampton Court. H. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting^ ed. Wornum, ii, p. ii. H. A. Mueller, Allgem. Kunstlerlex. (1896), ii, p. 31. ' According to H. A. Mueller, Allgem. Kunstlerlex. ,\\ (1906), p. 104, she was born in Rome and died in London. INDEXES INDEX I GENERAL A. A., medallist, 66. Abondio, Antonio, the Younger, 15, 1 7 f. ; medal of Trezzo, 70; of Ferabosco, 74; of him, by a pupil (?), 75 ; his visit to Spain, 70. Agrippa, Camillo, viii. Albert:, Leone Battista, 8, 29 f. Alfonso V, King of Naples, as a colledor, 5; medals of, 3, 10. Allori, Alessandro, 78 f. Angussola, Sophonisba, 59 f. Anjou, Ren6 d', viii. Antiquity, its influence on Italian art, 3 f., 8 ; antique motives copied, 11, 14, 34 f; influence of ancient coins, 4 f., 145 34f-> 43j 46, 49> 52- Ardenti, Agostino, 66. Ardenti, Alessandro, of Faenza, 65 f. Ardenti, Alessandro, of Lucca, AsTALLiA, Giulia, 2. Athenion, gem by, copied on medals, 11, 48 f. AvERLiNo, Antonio (Filarete), portraits of, 32 f. Badile, Giov., 31. Bandinelli, Baccio, ^^. Bartolelli, Giov. Peruzzo, viii. Bassiano, Alessandro, 5 1 f. Belli, Valerio, 48 f. Bellini, Gentile, 13, 38 f. Bellini, Giov., 23, 39. Bertoldo di Giovanni, medal by, II. BioNDo, Flavio, 6. BoLDu, Giov., medallist, 14, 33 f. Bombarda, medallist, 74. BoNiFAzio, Natale, 80. Bramante, Donato di Angelo, 14, 23, 41 f. Briosco, Andrea, 50. Buonarroti, see Michelangelo. Cambi, Andrea, medallist, 74. Cam PI, Bernardino, 68, 71. Cam PI, Giulio, 55 f. Canacci Family, false medals of, 20 f. Candida, Giov., medallist, 13 f, 36 f. Capocaccia of Ancona, 17. Caradosso Foppa, medallist, 1 3 f ; medal of Bramante, 42 ; engraves diamonds, 7 1 . Caro, Annibal, 9. Caroto, Giovanni, 44. Carrara, medals of the, 7. Caselli, Giov. Battista, 58 f. Casoni, Antonio, 81. Casting of Medals, i 6 f. Cavino, Giov. dal, 14 f., 51 f. Cellini, Benvenuto, i3f. 85 86 INDEX I Cesati, Alessandro, 1 3 f. Charles V grants title to Leone Leoni, 54; employs Trezzo, 71- Charles and Caterina of Savoy employ G. B. della Croce, 81. Chasing of Medals, 15, 61. CiGLAMoccHi, Lor., viii. Clovio, Giulio, 52 f. Coins, early colle6lors of, 4 f. ; use of, in study of portraiture, 20 ; ancient, imitated by medal- lists, 43, 46, 49, 52 ; technique of, how related to medallic, 6, 16. Constantine, mediaeval medal of, 6. Crivelli, Benedetto, 48. Crivelli, Gian Pietro, 47. Croce, Giov. Battista della, 80 f Cyriac of Ancona, 5. Diamonds, engraving of, 71. Dies, engraving of, I5f. DONATELLO'S DiOMEDE, COpicd on medal, 1 1 . DoRiA, Andrea, 53 f. DuLci, Giannantonio, 52. Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy employs G. B. della Croce, 80. Enzola, medal of Costanzo Sforza, 2 ; his struck pieces, 15- EscoRiAL, work at, by Trezzo, 7 1 ; by Zucchero and Tibaldi, 77- EsTE, Alfonso I d', 11, 49. EsTE, Leonello d', medals of, 6, 9 ; imfrese of, 9. Eye, winged, impresa of Alberti, 30- Facing Heads on coins and medals, 1 8 f False Medals, 20 ff. Fantuzzi, Gaspare, 51. Farinata, Paolo, viii. Ferabosco, Pietro, de Layno, architedt, 74 f. Ferabosco, Pietro, of Lucca, 75. FiACCO, Orlando, portrait of Titian, 57. Figino, Girolamo, 63 f. FiLARETE, Ant., see Averlino. FiLARETE, Francesco, 40. Florence : Tower of Santa Croce, by Francesco da Sangallo, 58 ; paintings in Duomo by Vasari and Zucchero, 76. Florentine School of Medal- lists, 10 f. FoNTANA, Annibale, 62. Fontana, Domenico, 79 f. FoNTANA, Lavinia, 81. Forgeries of Medals, 20 fF. ; of ancient coins, 52. Fosco, Andrea, 66. Francesco Pratense, portrait of Bandinelli by, 55. Francesco Volterrano, 71 f. Francia, Francesco, false medal of, 24 f. Franco, Battista, viii. Francucci, Innocenzo, 51. Frederick II, 6. French School of Medallists, origin of, 37. Galeotti, Pier Paolo, 18 ; his medal of Lomazzo, 63 ; medal of Figino attributed to, 64. INDEX I 87 Gambeleo, Vettor, medal of Gentile Bellini, 13, 38 ; of Giov. Bellini, 39 ; influence of antique on, 14; his own medal, 42. Gentileschi, Artemisia, 81 f. Geremia, Cristoforo, viii, 13 f., Ghirlandajo, Dom., his view of portraiture, 13. Ghisi, Diana, 72. Giancristoforo Romano, 14. Graces, the three, reverse of medal, 1 1 . Greco, il, portrait of Giulio Clovio, 53. GUERCINO, 24 f. Heraclius, mediaeval medal of, 6. Imola, Innocenzo da, 51. Imfrese, 9 f. India, Bernardino, 78. Inscriptions on medals, false, 21 f. John VIII, Palaeologus, medal of,7f. Justinian, medallion of, 7. Lancilotti, Francesco, 40 f. Leonardo da Vinci, ix. Leoni, Leone, 15, i7f., 53ff. ; his portraits of Andrea Doria, 53 f. ; of himself, ibid. ; of Baccio Bandinelli, 55 ; of Michelangelo, 60 f.; ofVasari, 65 f.; medal of Titian attri- buted to, 56 f. Leoni, Lodovico, 18, 67. LoMAzzo, Giov. Paolo, 62 f. Lonati, Giov. Battista, viii. Lysippus, medallist, 13 f., 20, 22, 35ff- M., medallist, 79. Marascha, Gianfrancesco, 22. Marescotti, Antonio, medal ot Pisanello attributed to, 32. Marescotti, Antonio, portrait of, viii. Marsupini, Elena, 58. Mary Tudor, Trezzo's medal of, 71. Medici, Cosimo I, de', 58, 73. Medici, Lor. de', medals of, 11. Michelangelo, Buonarroti, por- trait of, by il Greco, ^^ ; medals and wax portrait of, 60 f. ; engraving of, 61. MiSERONi, Gasparo, 73. Miseroni, Girolamo, the elder, 73 f- Miseroni, Girolamo, the Younger, Schatzmeister at Prague, 73 f. Miseroni, Giulio, 73. Negroboni, Giacomo, wax-model for medal of, 17 note. NiccoLo Fiorentino, see Spi- nelli. NicHOLAus, medallist, 9, 32. NissELYS, Helena, 6g. Paduan School, influence of antique on, 15; forgeries of Roman coins by, 52. Parmigianino, 61. Parolaro, Francesco, 59. 88 INDEX I Pasti, Matteo de', medal of Sigismondo Malatesta, 2 ; of Albert!, 29 f. Pastorino of Siena, 17, 79; medal of Titian, 57; of Paro- laro, 59 ; of Zucchero, 77. Petrarch as a coUedtor, 4 f. Petrocini, medallist, 22. Philip II employs Trezzo, 71; Zucchero, 76 f. ; Trezzo' s medal of, 71 ; medal of, by G. P. Poggini, 77. Pico DELLA MiRANDOLA, Gian- francesco, 22. PiosNA, Aurelio, 68. PiSANELLo, his medals of the Malatesta, d'Avalos, Cecilia Gonzaga,2 ; originates the true medal, 6 f. ; medal of Palaeo- logus, 7 f. ; of Alfonso V, 2, 10; of Vittorino da Feltre, 2 1 ; portraits of, 3 1 f. PiSANO, Antonio, see Pisanello. Plaque, differentiation of, from the medal, 8, 15. PoGGiNi, Domenico, medallist, 79- Poggini, Gianpaolo, medallist, 77- PoMEDELLi, Gian Maria, 45 if. Portraiture, its double revela- tion, 1 2 f. ; Florentine and Venetian, 1 3 ; evidence of medals for, 1 8 if. Pratense, Francesco, portrait of Bandinelli by, ^^. Primaticcio, false medal of, 24 f. Primavera, Jacopo, 69 f. QuALLA, Teodoro, 68. Quattromani, Sertorio, 9. Raibolini, Francesco, j^i? Francia. Raphael, portrait of Bramante by, 42. Reduction of Models, 19. Refatus, Timotheus, 67 £ ' Restitutions,' 20 f. Reverse, an integral part of the medal, 8 f. ; Florentine make- shifts, II. Riccio, 49 f. Roman School of Medallists, Romano, Giancristoforo, see Giancristoforo. Romano, Pier Paolo, see GaleottI, Pier Paolo. Rome, St. Peter's, Bramante's design for, 42 ; obelisks eredted by Fontana, 79 f Rossi, Properzia de', viii. Rota, Martin, engraving of Antonio Abondio, 75. Rudolph II employs Giov. Ambrogio Miseroni, 73. RusPAGiARi, Alfonso, 17, 64 f., 66. Salvalaglio, Antonio, 22. Salviati, portrait of Bandinelli attributed to, ^^. Sangallo, Francesco da, 57 f. Sansovino (Jacopo Tatti), 23, 67, 77 f. Sculpture, medals compared with, if., 18 f Scultore, Diana, 72. Sebenico, Natale da, portrait of Dom. Fontana, 80. Sorte, Cristoforo, 23. Sperandio of Mantua, medallist, 12, 18. INDEX I 89 Spinelli, Niccoli di Forzore, Florentine medallist, 6, 10 f. ; medal of Alfonso d'Este, 11, 49 ; of Lorenzo de' Medici, 1 1 ; medals attributed to, 10, 40 f Struck, as opposed to cast, medals, 15 fF., 43. Tatti, Jacopo, see Sansovino. Tebaldeo, Antonio, false medal of, 22. Tectori, Andrea, vili. TiBALDi, Pellegrino, 77. Tintoretto, his portrait of San- sovino, 67. Titian, ^2> note, 56 f. Torre, Gianello della, viii. Torre, Girolamo di Giulio della, Torre, Giulio della, 44 £f., 78. T. R., medallist, 72. Trezzo, Jacopo NizoUa da, 15, i7f., 72f., 75. Vasari, Giorgio, 68 f. Vecellio, see Titian. Venetian School of Medal- lists, 14. Veronese, Paolo, 61, dd. Vettori, Paolo, false medal of, 21. V. F., signature of medallist, viii. Vinci, Leonardo da, ix. Virtic, 3. Vittore Belliniano, his portrait of Giov. Bellini, 39. ViTTORiA, Alessandro, 18, 67, Vivarini, Alvise, drawing attri- buted to, 39. Volterrano, Francesco, 71. Wax-model, development of the, 16 f. Zappi, Lavinia Fontana, 81. Zucchero, Federigo, 76 f INDEX II COLLECTIONS, ETC. \^Unless otherwise described, the obje£ts are medals'] BERLIN, Kaiser-Friedrich-Mu- seum Bandinelli, 55 ; Bandinelli (terra- cotta), 55; Giov. Bellini, 39; Boldili, 33; Giul. Campi, 55; Giov. Caroto, 44; Fr. Francia, 24; Art. Gentileschi, 81 ; Fr. Lancilotti, 41 ; Parolaro, 59; Pisanello, 31 ; Pomedelli, 46; Riccio, 50 J Titian, 56; Giul. della Torre, 45 ; Jac. da Trezzo, 70; Vasari, 68; Fr. Volterrano, 71- BOSTON, U.S.A., Mrs. Gard- ner Baccio Bandinelli by Sebastiano or Salviati (painting), 55. BRESCIA, Museo Civico Giov. Batt. Caselli, 59; Giov. Paolo Lomazzo, 63. CHANTILLY, Mus6e Cond6 Giov. Bellini (drawling) by Vitt. Belliniano, 39. FIESOLE, S. Maria Primerana Francesco da Sangallo (marble re- lief), 58. FLORENCE, Duomo Frescoes by Vasari and Fed. Zuc- chero, 76. FLORENCE, Museo Nazionale (Bargello) Franc. Lancilotti, 40. FLORENCE, Opera del Duomo Baccio Bandinelli (marble relief), 55- FLORENCE, Uffizi Painted portraits: Soph. Angussola, 60; Bandinelli, 55; Giov. Bellini, ^3) 39; Clovio, 53; Jac. Sanso- vino (by Tintoretto), 67 ; Vasari, 69; Fed. Zucchero, 77. Gems: Crystal casket by V. Belli, 49 ; crystal, etc., vases by the Miseroni, 73. HAMPTON COURT Art. Gentileschi (painting), 82. LONDON, British Museum Ant. Abondio, 75; Alberti, 29; Allori, 78; Al. Ardenti, 65; Bandinelli (drawling), 55; Bas- siano, 51 ; Val. Belli, 48; Gent. Bellini, 38 ; Bernardino Campi, 68; Cavino, 51 ; Clovio, 52; G. P. Crivelli, 47 ; G. B. della Croce, 80 ; Gir. Figino, 63; Dom. Fontana, 79 ; Lav. Fontana, 81 ; Vettor Gambello, 43; Innoc. da Imola, 5 1 ; Bernardino India, 90 INDEX II 91 78; Leone Leoni, 53; G. P. Lomazzo, 62; Lysippus, 35; Michelangelo, 60 ; Michelangelo (engraving), 6t; Michelangelo (wax), 61 ; Pisanello, 31 ; Tim. Refatus, 67 ; Franc, da Sangallo, 57; Diana Scultore, 72; Titian, 56 f.; Al. Vittoria, 77; Fed. Zucchero, 76. LONDON, Vidloria and Albert Museum Ant. Averlino, 32 ; Giov. Boldu, 34; Jacopo Sansovino, 67. LONDON, Mr. T. W. Greene Giov. Batt. Caselli, 58. LONDON, Mr. Henry Oppen- heimer Gentile Bellini, 38. LONDON, Mr. Maurice Rosen- heim Bramante, 42; Michelangelo, 61. MADRID, Escorial Screen (Trezzo), 71 ; Custodia (Trezzo), 7 1 ; Retablo (Zuc- chero, etc.), 77; Casket with crystal plaques (G. B. della Croce), 80. MADRID, Prado Titian, by himself (painting), 57, MILAN, Ambrosiana(.?) Leone Leoni, 54. MILAN, Brera Giulio Clovio, 53; Andrea Fosco, 66. MILAN, Mus. Artistico Muni- cipale (Cast. Sforzesco) Ant. Averlino, 33 ; Lomazzo, 62. MILAN, Poldi Pezzoli Gallery Soph. Angussola (painting), 60. MODENA, Este Museum Giov. Candida, 36. MUNICH, Milnzkabinett Giulio della Torre, 45. NAPLES Portrait of Clovio by il Greco, 53 ; Gem by Athenion, 48 f. OXFORD, Christ Church Lib- rary Drawing of Gentile Bellini, 38. PADUA, S. Antonio Candelabrum by Riccio, 50. PARIS, BibHotheque Nationale Alberti, 29; Soph. Angussola, 60; Fr. Filarete, 40; Jac. Primavera, 69; Alf Ruspagiari, 64; Fr, da Sangallo, 57. PARIS, Louvre L. B. Alberti, 29; Drawing by Raphael with portrait of Bra- mante, 42. PARIS, M. Gustave Dreyfus L. B. Alberti, 8, 29; Gentile Bellini (marble relief), 38; Giov. Candida, 37. PARMA MUSEUM Gir. Miseroni, 73. REGGIO D'EMILIA MU- SEUM Francesco Parolaro, 59. RIMINI, Tempio Malatestiano Alberti (marble medallion), 30. ROME, Borghese Gallery Portrait (painting) by Soph. Angus- sola, 60. ROME, St. Peter's Bronze doors by Filarete, 33. STOCKHOLM Titian, by Orlando Fiacco (paint- ing). 57- TURIN, Royal Colleftion G. P. Crivelli, 47. VENICE, Museo Correr Gentile Bellini, 38 ; Jacopo Sanso- vino, 23. 92 INDEX II VENICE, Semlnario Sansovino (marble bust) by Vittoria, 67. VERONA, S. M. della Scala Fresco by Giov. Badile, 31. VIENNA, Manzkabinett G. B. della Croce, 8 1 ; Pietro Fera- bosco, 74; Titian, 57. VIENNA, Imperial mer Crystal table-piece mus Miseroni, 73. Schatzkam- by Hierony- WEIMAR, Goethe-Sammlung Gentile Bellini, 38. PLATES OF MEDALS PLATE XVI I. LEONE BATTISTA ALBERTI PLATE XVn LEONE BATTISTA ALBERTI PLATE XVIII '/^' J' ■ii^^ 7" .ry/rr/f) ,,- 4. ALBERTI 5,6. PISANELLO 7. AVERLINO PLATE XIX GIOVANNI BOLDU PLATE XX 10. LVSIPPUS 11, 12. CANDIDA 13, 14. GENTILE AND GIOV. BELLINI PLATE XXI ^' 15. FR. FILARETE 16. LANCILOTTI 17. BRA.AIANTE 18. GAMBELLO PLATE XXII 19 \ 19. GIOV. CAROTO 20, 21. GIULIO BELLA TORRE PLATE XXIII 22. G. M. POMEDELLI 23. G. P. CRIVELLI 24. 25, V. BELLI 6. RICCIO 27. INNUC. DA IMOLA 28. CAVL\0 29. GIULIO CLOVIO PLATE XXIV ^ _ -r^:vr«»ff^>V)^^ i^M '// w^M%^ 30, 31. LEONE LEONI 32. BANDINELLL 33. GIUL. CAMPI 34, 35. TITL\N 36. FR. SANGALLO PLATE XXV 37. FR. SANGALLO 38. GIOV BATT. CASELLI 39. SOPH. ANGUSSOLA PLATE XXVI 40, 40a, 40b. MICHELANGELO 41, 42. LOMAZZO 43. GIR. FIGINO 45. AL. ARDENTI PLATE XXVII 44' ALF. RUSPAGIARI 46. ANDREA FOSCO PLATE XXVIII 47. JAC. SAXSOVINO 4,8. TIM. REFATUS 49. BERN. CAMPI 50, GIORGIO VASARI 51. JAC, PRIMAVERA PLATE XXIX 56 57 52. TREZZO 53. PR. VOLTERRANO 54. DIANA SCULTORE ,-q. GIR MISERONI 56. PIETRO FERABOSCO 57. ANT. ABONDIO PLATE XXA ^8, 59- FFD ZUCCHERO 60. VITTORIA 6. INDIA 6: ALLORI 63,64. DOM.FONTANA PLATE XXXI 67 65. GIOV. BATT. DELLA CROCE 66. LA\TNIA FONTAx\A 67. ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI PLATE XXXII ,^'{r^>. ■*- ^ ^' '■^ '^ "if ^-^^"^ /-; ^ --' i*. Berlin and London SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MEDALS OF FR. FRANCIA, GUERCINO AND PRIMATICCIO CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.