Federica Missere Fontana. Testimoni parlanti: Le monete antiche a Roma tra Cinquecento e
Seicento
Author(s): John Cunnally
Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Winter 2010), pp. 1260-1262
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658520 .
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1260
RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY
Federica Missere Fontana. Testimoni parlanti: Le monete antiche a Roma
tra Cinquecento e Seicento.
Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2009. 540 pp. index. illus. bibl. €28. ISBN: 987–88–7140–425–7.
Well known for her many articles on Enea Vico and other Renaissance
numismatists, Federica Missere Fontana here provides us with an account of the
period immediately following the activity of these pioneer coin-collectors, the
century extending from the 1590s to about 1700. This was an age of transition for
numismatics, during which an activity marked by fanciful interpretation and
REVIEWS
1261
enthusiastic but chaotic acquisition evolved into a well-established auxiliary science
befitting the historians of the Enlightenment, with its own recognized methodology
and trustworthy canon of types and specimens. Testimoni parlanti demonstrates
that this evolution was neither straightforward nor inevitable, but the result of an
agonistic process involving enormous labors on the part of collectors, dealers, and
scholars. During the seventeenth century the fledgling science of numismatics
remained in danger of falling into disuse or disrepute on account of the problem of
distinguishing genuine coins from modern forgeries, and suffered the attacks of
Counter-Reformation zealots who suspected the collectors of pagan sympathies, as
well as critics mocking their discipline as pedantic trivia.
The author’s method is to examine in depth and in chronological order
a number of texts from this period associated with the humanistic circles of Rome,
beginning with the ambit of Fulvio Orsini and the Cardinals Farnese, and ending
with the work of Ezechiel Spanheim at the expatriate court of Queen Christina of
Sweden. Some of these texts are available only in manuscript form in Italian
collections, and thus virtually unknown to most researchers in this field.
The first chapter focuses on the Dialogos de medallas of Archbishop Antonio
Agustı́n, published in Spanish in 1587, and reissued in two Italian versions printed
in Rome in 1592. In a close reading of the two translations Missere Fontana reveals
the fine awareness of the editors toward the new vigilance of the CounterReformation, such as the removal of a mention of Erasmus from Agustı́n’s original
text. Both Italian versions can be viewed as part of a project by Roman antiquarians to
shield the science of numismatics from any suspicion of dangerous nostalgia for the
pagan past by associating it with an author whose orthodoxy and piety were beyond
question, and revealing its usefulness in shedding light on early Christian history.
A manuscript of drawings of 1500 ancient coins in the Biblioteca Civica of
Verona, attributed to the Roman antiquarian Lodovico Compagni (d. 1637), reveals
in its annotations the constant struggle of Seicento numismatists to separate authentic
coins from the products of modern forgers, who were becoming increasingly clever in
imitating the style and imagery of antiquity. This was also a concern of Francesco
Gottifredi (1596–1669), whose 600 letters offering advice to fellow collectors are
preserved in the Biblioteca Oliveriano of Pesaro. For verification these scholars
developed the principles of autopsia, the personal examination of a specimen, and the
necessity of a long apprenticeship in handling large numbers of coins, la scuola delle
esperienze, which will train a numismatist to detect slight anomalies that a false piece
might reveal only to the most practiced eye.
A volume of Adolf Occo’s important checklist of Roman imperial money, the
Impp. Romanorum numismata of 1579, now in the University Library at Bologna, is
notable for containing extensive annotations by four distinguished numismatists
who owned it in succession: Dionigi Ottaviano Sada, Lodovico Compagni,
Leonardo Agostini, and Giovan Pietro Bellori. Their concern with correcting and
updating the material originally gathered by Occo reveals a third principle, along
with autopsia and the scuola delle esperienze, which the Seicento numismatists
bequeathed to their colleagues of the Enlightenment: the necessity of riscrittura, of
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constantly rewriting and supplementing the older texts to keep the science of
numismatics alive and relevant to the concerns of contemporary collectors and
scholars. The authority of the older masters must undergo continuous refreshment:
only in this way can the ancient coins be trusted as testimoni parlanti, speaking
witnesses for a vanished past. The concept of coins as testimoni originates with Enea
Vico, the Renaissance pioneer whose 1555 Discorsi sopra le medaglie extolled the
nobility and utility of numismatics. Updated and modernized for a new generation
of scientific researchers, Vico’s arguments entered the Enlightenment in the form of
Ezechiel Spanheim’s Dissertatio de praestantia et usu numismatum of 1664.
JOHN CUNNALLY
Iowa State University