Renaissance Medals Italy

The National Gallery of Art houses the single most important collection of portrait medals in the United States. This two-volume catalogue examines in depth these holdings, comprising more than nine hundred medals. Providing detailed technical information--including the alloy composition of each medal--drawn from careful research, observation, and analysis, Renaissance Medals breaks new ground in the scholarly literature. Volume 1 focuses on the Gallery's superb collection of Italian Renaissance medals, unique in their quality, number, and diversity.

Published in 1930, Portrait Medals of Italian Artists of the Renaissance is a collection of essays and illustrations on the subject of Italian medal-making during the Renaissance period. The author, George Francis Hill, was an expert in the history of medals and coins and provides detailed descriptions and analysis of the works of artists such as Pisanello and Matteo de' Pasti. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from Portrait Medals of Italian Artists of the Renaissance: Illustrated and Described, With an Introductory Essay on the Italian Medal The acknowledgments which must now be made seem long out of all proportion to a book of such slight dimensions and small importance as this; but the process of obtaining casts of the rarer medals has laid me under a heavy obliga tion to many, which must not pass unnoticed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The papers published in this book were delivered at two conferences held in conjunction with the exhibition, " The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance"

Excerpt from Medals of the Renaissance In the autumn of 1915, at the invitation of the Council of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, I had the honour of delivering in Edinburgh the Rhind Lectures, of which this book is the outcome. In preparing it for the press, the matter of the lectures has been revised, partly re-arranged, and occasionally re-written with large additions, while footnotes have been supplied throughout with the object of making the book of some use as a work of reference. There are many volumes on separate portions of the subject, but none, I believe, that can be regarded as an attempt to give a general summary of the whole. Illustrations have been a serious difficulty. In delivering the lectures, every medal that was mentioned was also illustrated. Was the same plan to be followed in the printed book? That would have meant either an unusually lavish amount of illustration or else the cutting out of a great number of links in the argument. I have preferred to leave many of the pieces unillustrated, in the hope that those who take a real interest in the subject will refer to the illustrations which are to be found elsewhere, and to which references are supplied. The arrangement of the medals on the plates will, I fear, prove irksome. Thus, medals by the same artist are illustrated on different plates, and not in the order in which they are mentioned in the text, an inconvenience which is due to the fact that some of the plates are from borrowed negatives, while others are newly photographed. Again, the scale on which the reproductions are made has inevitably varied with the size of the original. Reproduction is now so costly that it was absolutely necessary to borrow negatives and, further, to reduce the scale of reproduction of many pieces; the result is a distribution of the medals which is anything but scientific. Two works on Italian medals which are seldom mentioned in the footnotes - simply because the only alternative would have been to mention them on every page - are Alfred Armand's Médailleurs de la Renaissance, which, with all its faults, remains and will long remain the standard book on the subject, and Cornelius von Fabriczy's clever though rather ill-proportioned sketch, which I have cited by Mrs. Hamilton's translation, entitled Italian Medals. Any references given in my notes for details about an Italian medallist should be supplemented by reference to these books, which are fully indexed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.