The following is the introduction to our catalog for The Santini Collection of Renaissance Medals, crossing the auction block on April 15. To view lots and place pre-sale bids visit StacksBowers.com.
As I sat down to write this, I was distracted by an email that popped into my inbox with the headline “Renaissance Portrait Sets $3.1 Million Record.” Needless to say, the headline caught my attention, given the subject matter of this auction. The concept of the medal as we know it today had its origins in the Italian Renaissance, and though it had earlier antecedents, the medal was given its now familiar format by Italian Renaissance artist Antonio di Puccio Pisano, called Pisanello. Pisanello’s medals have a very distinct style and format that can be identified from across the room, and many artists around the world have, with varying degrees of success, imitated that style over the centuries since Pisanello’s first medals were cast.
Though fantastic quality Renaissance medals are not a common sight in American numismatic auctions, they may occasionally be found by scouring the offerings in auctions across Europe and the U.S., and by reviewing the stocks of medal and art dealers at galleries and coin fairs. Building a world class collection is possible but not for the impatient or the faint of heart, as comprehensive offerings of great medals are infrequent, and the supply is generally slim. In the last couple of decades, there have been a few notable auction offerings, such as the Michael Hall, John R. Gaines, and Lawrence R. Stack Collections, which have enlivened the field with demand-inducing supplies of terrific medals. After all, without a steady supply of things to collect, a collector can become frustrated and abandon the collecting project. So it is with pride that Stack’s Bowers Galleries offers the small but significant collection of medals presented in the pages to follow, perhaps the largest offering of these historic medals by an American auction firm. The collection was a work in progress, with purchases of great medals and plaquettes from auctions of the last decade. However, the core of the Santini Renaissance Medal cabinet—the collection of numismatist-connoisseur Jonathan H. Kagan—was formed by that gentleman via private and auction purchases in the 1990s and was purchased by the Santini Collection in 2019-2020.
While the five dozen medals and plaquettes in this collection represent an opportunity to buy some fine quality Renaissance medals (as were the hundreds of medals in the Hall, Gaines and Stack collections), the general trend in Renaissance medals over the last century has been forced market rarity, as significant collections have been donated to institutional collections. The famed Gustave Dreyfus Collection is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., while collectors Mark and Lottie Salton donated most of their fantastic Renaissance medals during their lifetimes. Perhaps the greatest proponent and contemporary collector of these little works of art has been the great scholar-collector Stephen K. Scher, who curated the groundbreaking traveling exhibition and catalog The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance in the early 1990s. Stephen and his wife Janie Woo Scher recently donated their own nearly 900-piece collection of medals—centered around the Renaissance but including significant medals through the 19th century—to The Frick Collection in New York, forever removing one of the most significant collections of Renaissance medals from the marketplace.
If you are new to Renaissance medals, you may not know where to begin. Though they share much in common with coins and have been traditionally studied and collected along with coins, they may also be thought of as miniature two-sided (or one-sided, in some cases) sculptures or works of art. This is how Scher approached his six decades of medal collecting, focusing not on the subject matter of the medals, but rather on the aesthetic aspects of any medal he was considering for his collection. So, when collecting Renaissance medals, one need not worry that the wonderful portrait on a medal at hand is of a minor, little known character in Italian history, but rather focus on the beauty of the medal. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Is the medal’s design well-executed? Is the medal in a high state of condition? Is the medal—whether struck or cast, as in most cases here—well-made? Is the medal an original or early casting? It was by following these parameters that Scher built the incredible collection that now resides at The Frick. And fortunately for you, many of these parameters have been fulfilled by the medals in the Santini Collection, often acquired from auctions of great medals or, as noted, from the collection of Jonathan H. Kagan, whose skilled connoisseurship is reflected here.
Though Scher was not hyper-focused on subject matter, it can often provide a reason to collect a particular medal. Perhaps you collect more modern medals and want a work by the father of the medal. Then one of the Pisanellos in this sale is in your future. Collect ancient Roman Imperial coins? Then the gorgeous and charming medal of Caracalla by Boldù or perhaps the medal of the Empress Faustina by Filarete (whose doors adorn St. Peter’s Cathedral) is for you. Collect architecture in nummis? Try the charming castles on the reverses of the portrait medals of Sigismondo Malatesta and Niccolo Todini. As a student of early American numismatics, I was charmed by the plaquette of the Punishment of Tityus, as a very similar rendering also appears on the backs of the South Carolina $70 notes of February 8, 1779; these renderings were apparently based on the 1532 drawing of the scene by Michelangelo Buonarroti.
One reason that entry into the field of Renaissance Medals is so enticing is their relatively modest price to value ratio—the price of entry to the field is a far cry from the above-mentioned, record-setting $3.1 million price tag recently garnered by Sotheby’s for Bernardino de’ Conti’s ca. 1500 Portrait of an Elegantly-Attired Noblewoman in Profile. One could patiently build a fantastic collection of Renaissance medals for far less than the price of this one painting, while enjoying a lifetime collecting objects of similar aesthetic or historical appeal. For example, many of the individual medals in this auction will sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars, while fantastic ones will sell in the tens of thousands. In rare cases one might bring hundreds of thousands of dollars, less than even the $249,000 price tag of Bernardino de’ Conti’s Noblewoman when it last came to market in 1993. If you are a seasoned collector of Renaissance medals, I am not telling you anything new. But hopefully these few words, and especially the medals to follow, will inspire you to follow in the Renaissance medal collecting footsteps of Dreyfus, Gaines, Hall, Scher, Stack and their many predecessors and contemporaries.
