Speaker
Description
Jacopo Strada (c. 1515 – 1588) created two monumental numismatic corpora in the 16th century: Firstly, an originally 30-volume corpus of coin drawings of the Roman emperors until the 16th century with over 8,500 drawings, the Magnum ac Novum Opus; now in the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha. Secondly, an eleven-volume work with the first systematic coin descriptions, the A.A.A. NumismatΩn Antiquorum Διασκευή, nowadays in the Universitätsbibliothek Wien.
According to Strada, the coin descriptions should be complementary to the coin drawings. This claim was the starting point of our project at the Forschungszentrum Gotha: We digitized the drawings and descriptions and compared them. Subsequently, we tried to identify the original coins. The results are entered into the databases of the "Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture known in the Renaissance" (HU Berlin) and "Translatio Nummorum" (KHI Florenz). They provide interesting insights into the knowledge and methods of antiquarians in the 16th century.
