Eighteenth-Century Collections
Prestige and numismatics were definitely each other’s obverse and reverse in the early eighteenth century. France continued to try and project its ‘gloire’ by producing numismatic works (albeit harking back to the true glory days of Louis XIV (1638–1715), King of France. Sweden, which had become a major power during the catastrophic Thirty Years War (1618–48), began to pay more attention to recently found hoards of coins from their Viking past and these would be explored in a series of important publications by the Swedish numismatist, Nils (Nicolas) Keder (1659–1735), who wrote primarily about the royal collections of Sweden. Christian Sigismund Liebe (1687–1736), a German numismatist would make famous the collections at Gotha, while the Jesuit Paolo Pedrusi (1644–1720) would attempt to do the same for his masters at Parma.
Académie des inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Paris, Medailles sur les principaux evenements du regne entier de Louis le Grand, avec des explications historiques (Paris, 1723), p. 284: medal celebrating the accession of Philip (1683–1746), Duc D’Anjou to the throne of Spain (as Philip V), in 1700.
Edward Worth (1676–1733), owned the second edition of the Medailles sur les principaux evenements du regne entier de Louis le Grand, avec des explications historiques (Paris, 1723), and this continued where the first edition of 1702 had left off. The aim of both editions was to display the power and prestige of France and the above depiction, which celebrated the accession of Louis XIV’s grandson as Philip V of Spain, was one of the highpoints of Louis XIV’s reign. However, Philip V’s accession on 16 November 1700 to the throne of his great-uncle, Charles II (1661–1700), triggered a crisis among the great powers of Europe, leading to the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). Philip V was eventually recognised as king of Spain (having given up any claim to the French crown), in the Peace of Utrecht (1713) and the Treaties of Rastatt and Baden (1714). None of this contentious struggle which had rocked Europe is reflected in either the medal or its accompanying text which concentrates of the strength of Philip of Anjou’s claim to the throne of Spain – despite the fact that the first edition was published in 1702 and the second edition in 1723.
As Zarucchi suggests, the medals and the catalogues in effect presented a revisionist history and, while the medals themselves might not have a wide distribution, the printed catalogues served to popularize their message.[1] This was not just because originally medals had been produced periodically until François Le Tellier (1641–91), Marquis de Louvois decided they should be produced annually and the collection back-dated to reflect this change.[2] The 1702 catalogue allowed for such a re-envisioning of Louis XIV’s reign while the second edition of 1723 played an even more crucial role in attempting to stabilize the new reign. This was because the new king, Louis XIV’s great-grandson Louis XV (1710–74), was a minor, and a country led by a boy-king might well be viewed as ripe for the taking by other European powers. By reminding the great powers of the power of France – a power which the medals and their legends suggested had not died with Louis XIV – the crown hoped to bolster the position of the young king.[3]
Marc Maier, Il regno di Napoli e di Calabria, descritto con medaglie arrichito d’una descrittione compendiosa di quel famoso regno … Cavata da i più celebri ed approvati scrittori si antichi come moderni da Marco Maier (Lyon, 1717), Tabula Prima: ‘Di Napoli’.
The French crown was not alone in seeing the propagandistic uses of coins and medals and here we see Marc Maier’s 1717 text trying to do something similar for the Kingdom of Naples and Calabria. Under the treaty of Rastatt (1714), the Kingdom of Naples, which had formerly been under Spanish control, was ceded to Charles VI (1685–1730), Holy Roman Emperor. Austria did not keep it long and eventually Philip V’s son, Charles (1716–88), Duke of Parma and Piacenza, who later became Charles III of Spain, took it over in 1734, being installed as King of Naples and Sicily in 1735. In 1717 Maier, a Lyon bookseller, published a selection of 293 medals but instead of focusing on contemporary events, Maier sought to draw attention to Naples ancient past. The above plate depicts Greek coins from Naples. Maier had previously published an edition of Filippo Paruta’s La Sicilia di Filippo Paruta descritta con medaglie, e ristampata con aggiunta da Leonardo Agostini. Hora in miglior ordine disposta da Marco Maier (Lyon, 1697).[4]
Otto Sperling, De nummorum bracteatorum et cavorum nostræ ac superioris ætatis origine & progressu : ad Reverend. Dn. Jacobum a Mellen epistola (Lubeck, 1700), pp 8–9: plates of bracheate coins.
We have already seen the important role catalogues of collections might play in projecting power but this was not their only function: they also served as important tools for numismatists in developing and understanding their own and their patrons’ collections. Haidenthaller draws attention to other useful sources available to collectors which allowed them to track down coins: auction catalogues, newspapers, as well as correspondence and, more generally, numismatic publications.[5] Networks were crucial and one important correspondent whose letters sheds light on coin collecting in early eighteenth-century Scandinavia was Sophia Elisabeth Brenner (1659–1730), the wife of Elias Brenner (1647–1717), an influential collector of the medieval and early modern coinage of Scandinavia who is viewed by many as the ‘father of numismatics in Sweden’, though, as Sundquist notes, Keder is sometimes considered to have surpassed him in numismatic studies.[6] Brenner had been influenced by Johan Hadorph (1630–93), who had published drawings of old Swedish coins in 1668 and this focus in Scandinavian collections received an added impetus from the discovery of a host of coin hoards in the 1670s in Sweden.[7] Hadorph, Brenner and Keder were joined in their enthusiasm by a host of Swedish collectors – indeed Haidenthaller estimates that there were about 250 numismatic collectors active in Sweden during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[8]
Sophia Elisabeth Brenner’s correspondence points to the modalities of collecting in early eighteenth-century Sweden, and the role trading in coins, particularly duplicates played in increasing collections.[9] Writing to the Danish numismatist Otto Sperling the Younger (1634–1715), on 16 October 1704, she noted that:
Speaking of coins, I remember that I have heard my husband say that he would like to trade the coins for which he has duplicates, namely those minted by the kings of Denmark who once reigned in Sweden, too, e.g., those minted in Stockholm and Västeräs by Eric of Pomerania, those minted in Stockholm by Christian I, and those minted in Västeräs and Malmö by John II, for coins of those same kings minted in Denmark or for some bracteate coins marked with the names of the kings.[10]
Both the Brenners would have been well aware of Sperling’s 1700 text on bracteates and Sperling proved to be an important node in Sophia Elisabeth Brenner’s numismatic correspondence network.
While Keder tended to focus on early medieval coins, especially those of the Viking Age, Sperling’s focus was on medieval bracteates, thin fragile coins, which had been in vogue in the high middle ages. Svensson defines them as being ‘thin uni-faced silver coins that were struck with only one die’.[11] They were first struck in early twelfth-century Thuringia and Saxony-Meissen in Germany and the fashion spread to neighbouring lands, so much that at one stage they became, as Svensson notes, the dominant coin-type in central and eastern Europe as well as Scandinavia between c. 1140–1320.[12] One reason they were so popular was because they fitted in well with the re-coinage policies of Scandinavia as well as central and eastern Europe.[13] However, as inter-regional trade increased, the demand for multi-regional coins out-weighed the advantages of the bracteate. They continued to be struck for a following 250 years – well into the sixteenth century – but their appeal had substantially diminished from the beginning of the fourteenth century onwards.[14]
The Brenners may have been more assiduous than most collectors in early eighteenth-century Scandinavia but they were certainly not alone for auction catalogues of the time point to the spread of numismatic collecting. The publishers of the 1719 auction catalogue of the collection of the Swedish medal engraver Arvid Karlsteen (1647–1718), noted that Karlsteen, who was famous throughout Europe as a medallist, had been ‘an absolute curieus connoisseur’ and his collections naturally included, among other objets d’art, ‘Swedish and foreign silver medals of great weight and value, as well as others made of outstanding European artists’.[15] Unfortunately Karlsteen’s medals and coins were dispersed but luckily Brenner’s collection of 687 coins and medals were sold as a single lot, and though not all were kept together, some of them may be found in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.[16]
Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.
Sources
Callatay, François de, ‘Glory and misery of Belgian numismatics from the 16th to the 18th C. as seen through three milestones (Goltz 1563, Serrure 1847 and the Dekesels) and private correspondences’, in Moens, Jan (ed.), 175 Years of Royal Numismatic Society of Belgium: Proceedings of the Colloquium Belgium Numismatics in Perspective, Brussels, 21 May 2016 (Brussels, 2017), pp 37–129.
Göransson, Elisabet, ‘Letters of a Learned Lady : Sophia Elisabeth Brenner’s Correspondence, with an Edition of her Letters to and from Otto Sperling the Younger’ (University of Lund, Ph. D, 2006).
Haidenthaller, Ylva, ‘Collecting coins and medals in 18th-century Sweden’, Artium Quaestiones, 34 (2023), 111–37.
Jones, Mark, ‘The medal as an instrument of propaganda in late 17th and early 18th century Europe: Part I’, The Numismatic Chronicle (1966–), 142 (1982), 117–26.
Jones, Mark, ‘The medal as an instrument of propaganda in late 17th and early 18th century Europe: Part II’, The Numismatic Chronicle (1966–),143 (1983), 202–13.
Jonsson, Kenneth, ‘Numismatic Teaching in Sweden,’ in Wolters, Reinhard and Martin Ziegert (eds), Numismatik lehren in Europa: Beiträge der Internationalen Tagung vom 14.–16. Mai 2015 aus Anlass des 50-jährigen Bestehens des Instituts für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte der Universität Wien (Vienna, 2017), pp 149–56.
Sundquist, Torbjörn, ‘Nicolaus (Nils) Keder’, Svensk Numismatisk Tidskrift, September (2020), 117.
Svensson, Roger, ‘The Bracteate as Economic Idea and Monetary Instrument’, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, IFN Working Paper, no. 973 (2013), 1-25.
Zaruchi, Jeanne Morgan, ‘Medals Catalogues of Louis XIV : Art and Propaganda’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, 17, no. 4 (1998), 26–34.
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[1] Zaruchi, Jeanne Morgan, ‘Medals Catalogues of Louis XIV : Art and Propaganda’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, 17, no. 4 (1998), 27. Jones notes that this strategy might sometimes backfire – catalogues which aimed at popularizing the myth of the Sun King might also be used to create medals targeting the king by using his own iconograph against him; Jones, Mark, ‘The medal as an instrument of propaganda in late 17th and early 18th century Europe: Part II’, The Numismatic Chronicle (1966–),143 (1983), 207.
[2] Zaruchi, ‘Medals Catalogues of Louis XIV : Art and Propaganda’, 26–7.
[3] Ibid., 28.
[4] Paruta’s original edition had appeared in 1612, and was augmented by Leonardo Agostini’s 1649 edition. Worth also acquired Agostini’s Gemmae et sculpturae antiquae depictae ab Leonardo Augustino Senensi ; Addita earum enarratione, in Latinum versa ab Jacobo Gronouio cujus accedit præfatio (Franeker, 1699).
[5] On this see Haidenthaller, Ylva, ‘Collecting coins and medals in 18th-century Sweden’, Artium Quaestiones, 34 (2023), 111–37.
[6] Jonsson, Kenneth, ‘Numismatic Teaching in Sweden’, in Wolters, Reinhard and Martin Ziegert (eds), Numismatik lehren in Europa: Beiträge der Internationalen Tagung vom 14.–16. Mai 2015 aus Anlass des 50-jährigen Bestehens des Instituts für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte der Universität Wien (Vienna, 2017), p. 149; Sundquist, Torbjörn, ‘Nicolaus (Nils) Keder’, Svensk Numismatisk TIdskrift, September (2020), 117.
[7] Jonsson, Kenneth, Numismatic Teaching in Sweden, p. 149 and Tafel 14.
[8] Haidenthaller, ‘Collecting coins and medals in 18th-century Sweden’, 118.
[9] On Sophia Elisabeth Brenner’s correspondence with Otto Sperling the Younger see Göransson, Elisabet, ‘Letters of a Learned Lady : Sophia Elisabeth Brenner’s Correspondence, with an Edition of her Letters to and from Otto Sperling the Younger’ (University of Lund, Ph. D, 2006).
[10] Haidenthaller, ‘Collecting coins and medals in 18th-century Sweden’, 112.
[11] Svensson, Roger, ‘The Bracteate as Economic Idea and Monetary Instrument’, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, IFN Working Paper, no. 973 (2013), 1.
[12] Ibid., 1 and 8.
[13] Ibid., 7
[14] Ibid., 20.
[15] Haidenthaller,‘Collecting coins and medals in 18th-century Sweden’, 115–6.
[16] Ibid., 116.