Conveners
S31. ANTIQUITY & MIDDLE AGES 5. FONTES INEDITI NUMISMATICAE ANTIQUAE (FINA)
- Bernhard Woytek (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
S31. ANTIQUITY & MIDDLE AGES 5. FONTES INEDITI NUMISMATICAE ANTIQUAE (FINA)
- Bernhard Woytek (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Description
Org. and chair: Bernhard Woytek
The project "Fontes Inediti Numismaticae Antiquae" aims at collecting, studying and publishing early modern manuscript evidence related to ancient coinage; the focus is on material before c. 1800. The project was launched in 2011 and has been under the aegis of the Union Académique Internationale (UAI) since 2013 (project no. 84). Its background is twofold. On the one hand, there is currently a growing general interest in antiquarianism, of which numismatics forms an important part. On the other hand, studies in antiquarian numismatics have mainly been based on printed material so far. However, though very numerous, numismatic books (and articles in journals) are only a part of the total of information available for the study of the discipline, since a lot of key sources were never printed.
FINA fills this gap through the study of unpublished numismatic letters, manuscripts of numismatic works, manuscript inventories of coin collections, printed books with scholarly annotations and manuscript copies or translations of printed numismatic works (see the project website fina.oeaw.ac.at/). Since 2013, several third-party funded research projects on antiquarian numismatics, especially on the 16th and 18th centuries, have been conducted successfully. Two major international conferences - on Joseph Eckhel and on numismatic correspondence - were organised in 2015 and 2017 respectively, in Vienna and Rome. A wealth of information on numismatic letters and manuscripts, collected by Francois de Callatay and Guy Meyer, has been made available on the internet on an open access Semantic Media Wiki platform, which is constantly being expanded: fina.oeaw.ac.at/wiki/.
FINA was first presented to the broader numismatic public at the INC 2015 at Taormina. INC 2022 will provide an excellent opportunity to look back at what has been achieved in the meantime, to present some highlights and to map out promising directions for future research on manuscript sources for ancient numismatics.
The first part of this presentation will provide a short review of activities in the framework of the initiative "Fontes Inediti Numismaticae Antiquae" (FINA) since the 2015 International Numismatic Congress in Taormina: a specific focus will be on research projects on numismatic correspondence of the 18th century, as well as on the development of the FINA database now available online...
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...
The Florentine painter, Domenico Cresti detto il Passignano (1559-1638) formed a collection of 112 gold and 700-800 silver Roman coins. We know about it from a series of letters, written in 1647-50, when Passignano’s heirs tried to sell the collection to the young Nicolaas Heinsius. Heinsius wanted only the silver coins, however, and the gold specimens were offered, via Johannes Smetius in...
The numismatic collection of the Zane family has many extraordinary features in the panorama of 17th and 18th century Venetian collecting. Formed in the last decades of the seventeenth century and comprising only a few hundred antique gold coins, it seems to have been created almost by chance from local finds and preserved by three generations of Zane family members essentially as a means of...
The presentation illustrates the numismatic activity of the Venetian collector Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750), on the basis of hitherto unpublished sources. A short introduction of the documentary material at our disposal is followed by the discussion of two aspects of Zeno’s numismatic collecting: the catalogues of his coins written by Zeno himself, today kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana...
In 1747, the Augustinian monastery of St. Florian in Upper Austria acquired the coin collection of the Venetian scholar and court poet at the Imperial court in Vienna, Apostolo Zeno necessitating the ordering and cataloguing of this collection of about 12,000 coins. Over the years, several canons regular were appointed as custodians of the collection. In addition, numismatists from the...
The paper presents the research on the collecting, antiquarian and scholarly activities of Philipp von Stosch (1691-1757) related to engraved gems made on the basis of the unknown pictorial (drawings) and archival sources discovered in the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, the Vatican Library and private collections. Stosch's large commissions of drawings of intaglios and cameos are...
Jan Chrzciciel Albertrandi (1737-1808) was librarian and antiquarian at the service of Stanisław II August Poniatowski, King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Three letters by Albertrandi to Joseph Eckhel are kept in Vienna. They were written between July and October 1778, when Albertrandi was in Rome for the second time.
