Italian Medals c. 1530-1600 in British Public Collections by Philip AttwoodReview by: Raymond B. WaddingtonThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Fall, 2004), pp. 853-854Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477067 .

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Book Reviews 853

Italian Medals c. 1530-1600 in British Public Collections. Philip Attwood. London:

British Museum Press, 2003.Volume 1: text, viii + 536 pp. + 118 illus.Volume 2: illus

trations, 258 pls. L250.00/$450.00. ISBN 0-7141-0861-8.

REVIEWED BY: Raymond B. Waddington, University of California, Davis.

Twenty-some years ago, when I began collecting Renaissance medals, my mentor sold me, for a derisory amount, his copy of G. F Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance

before Cellini (London: British Museum, 1930) and remarked,"Now you can begin collecting seriously." Indeed, the massive two volumes of Hill's Corpus have remained the foundational

work of scholarship for the incunabular period of the medal. For reasons partly practical (the sheer size of the project) and partly aesthetic, Hill terminated his corpus around 1530 with the advent of Benvenuto Cellini. The screw press invented by Cellini greatly facilitated the

production of struck medals, a technological innovation that, for Hill, signaled a decline into artistic mediocrity from the remarkable achievements with cast medals. Until very recently, scholars and collectors interested in later developments have had no resource comparable to

Hill. That situation has changed markedly with the publication of Giuseppe Toderi and Fiorenza Vannel, Le medaglie italiane del XVI secolo, 3 vols. (Florence: Polistampa, 2000) and now Philip Attwood's catalog.

The two works follow Hill's organization by geographical region; both disclaim quali tative evaluation of individual examples; both offer biographies of artists and subjects where possible, plus bibliographies and indices. There the similarities end. Like Hill, Toderi and Vannel aspire to present a corpus; although they know it cannot be entirely complete, they have examined and describe 2,876 medals. Limited to the major British collections,Attwood terms his work a "catalog" of 1,258 items. The importance of the Toderi and Vannel work lies in its vast coverage, which extends to 935 medals not in Alfred Armand's Les Medailleurs italiens des quinzieme et seizieme siecles (Paris: Plon, 1883-87), hitherto the necessary supple

ment to Hill. Although this bounty gives their work a permanent value, in other respects it

leaves something to be desired. Curiously, they omit the sources of the medals they illustrate, nor do they identify the metallic composition; and they do not follow the usual practice of enumerating other known examples. These choices certainly limit the usefulness of their study as a finding list.

Within his narrower scope, Attwood is both less and more restrictive in his coverage. Whereas he includes papal medals only by artists represented for secular subjects, he differs from Toderi and Vannel in the inclusion of "mules," hybrid medals on which obverse and reverse from different artists have been combined, giving them separate entries. As well as diameter measurements, Attwood gives weights, noting that thickness measurements fre quently are too variable to be helpful. (Since not all metals weigh the same, one might demur that this only replaces one imprecise measurement with another.) But, more than anything,

what distinguishes Attwood's catalog is the formidable, even exhaustive, scholarship. The man seems to have read and absorbed everything. A subjective example: the bibliography in Toderi andVannel includes one of my own articles, with the title garbled;Attwood's lists four, all correctly. Whereas the Toderi and Vannel biographies are understandably concise,

Attwood's are full and detailed. In the former, Leone Leoni, the most distinguished medalist of the century, receives a half page; in the latter Leoni has eight pages with fourteen illustra tions and eighty endnotes.

The same amplitude and rigorous scholarship characterize the individual medal entries. Attwood translates all foreign language quotations, a feature particularly valuable for the leg

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854 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXV/3 (2004)

ends on medals, where misspellings are not uncommon and arbitrary abbreviations frequently can be mystifying.With unsigned medals, attribution can be a thorny issue, but Attwood does not shrink from grasping this nettle. In a number of entries he questions standard attributions, assigning, for instance, the medals of Charles V's daughters, Maria and Joanna, to Jacopo da Trezzo and the medal of Pietro Bembo with the Pegasus reverse to Danese Cattaneo. The often daunting iconography of medal reverses is not explained in many catalogs; Attwood, however, frequently provides succinct interpretative guides. He is unusual in commenting on the symbolism of dress and ornament on the obverse portraits, even discussing the symbolism of undress, as with the exposed breast in Antonio Abondio's portrait of Caterina Riva.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the catalog is the introduction which, extending to eighty pages in double-column, small type, would be monograph length in any normal for

mat. Attwood begins by defining the medal, then situates it within the sixteenth-century context, and describes the process of commissioning, designing, and making medals. He dis cusses their functions (personal immortality for subjects, political or dynastic purposes for the Church and for ruling families); follows the movements of Italian artists and styles to other European centers; surveys the history of medallic scholarship; and concludes by tracing the development of the British collections whose holdings are analyzed in the catalog. For Attwood medals are not the high art they were for Hill. He recognizes that few, if any, artists were primarily medallists and helpfully details the elements in common between medals and other artistic media. Attwood is instructive on the process of medal making, which is often a collaborative process between, e.g., the patron or subject, an iconographic advisor, the artist

who creates the model, a craftsman who engraves the dies or does the casting, even a later participant who alters the existing medal to create a different one. Although struck medals were made for wide distribution, there is no contemporary evidence that they were consid ered inferior to cast medals; nor was "chasing," the technique of finishing a cast medal by hand, regarded as a blemish.The occasional difficulty in determining whether a medal is cast or struck further complicates the distinction of kinds; and Attwood notes the frequency with

which surviving examples are cast from medals originally struck. A particularly valuable sec tion of the introduction explains the artistic developments and style characteristics of the var ious regional centers-the antiquarian influence on Paduan medals, say, or the taste for landscape reverses in Milan-thereby justifying and illuminating the geographical organiza tion of the catalog. Philip Attwood has produced a work of exemplary scholarship, full of information and rich in detail.

It may be useful, in closing, to reflect on the quantum leap in visual evidence. Armand's

nineteenth-century catalogue lacked illustrations; Hill's Corpus illustrates not the medals themselves but photographs of plaster casts made from them, a bland, leveling, and unsatis

factory solution. For photographs of mid- and later-sixteenth-century medals, we have had to rummage through a patchwork of individual collection and exhibition catalogues. Sud

denly withToderi andVannel and with Attwood we have a treasure trove of illustration.These are invaluable resources for not just medals people but iconographers, art historians, literary historians, social, political, and religious historians. Bravo!

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