Volume I: Esercizi di lettura. Edited by Lucia Simonato. 256 pp. incl. 227 b. & w. ills.; and Volume II: Catalogo. By Giulia Zaccariotto. 560 pp. incl. 976 col. ills. (Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2021), €80. ISBN 978–88–366–4884–9.

Following the publication ten years ago of the rich collection of Renaissance plaquettes assembled by the Milanese industrialist and philanthropist Mario Scaglia, this splendid two-volume catalogue presents his outstanding collection of Renaissance and Baroque medals (Fig.1).[1] The author of the earlier catalogue was an established specialist in the subject, Francesco Rossi, the former director of the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo. For his new catalogue, Scaglia has taken a quite different and highly commendable approach, using the opportunity to address the ever-more serious lack of opportunities for young scholars to develop specialist knowledge through object-based research and study. The first volume, prefaced by a warm tribute to Scaglia from Davide Gasparotto, accordingly consists of contributions by no fewer than sixteen mainly young Italian scholars, among them Giulia Zaccariotto, who is also the author of the second, catalogue volume. 

Assembled over more than four decades from the mid-1970s, the Scaglia collection consists of almost five hundred medals dating from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, the great majority of them cast rather than struck. The focus of the collection is on Italy, although there is an impressive group of French medals and a few from Flanders. Scaglia has always sought to acquire the best casts available, so the overall quality of the collection is extremely high. His own particular taste and interests have also guided the growth of the collection, which is especially strong in north Italian medals made in Lombardy, Emilia Romagna and the Veneto. There is by contrast a more representative selection of medals from other centres, such as Renaissance and Baroque Tuscany and France. The French medals include a superb group by Guillaume Dupré and his son Abraham (nos.457–75), but just three by the other great seventeenth-century makers, Jean Warin and his brother Claude (nos.478–80). 

The overall aim of the catalogue is to challenge the common perception of medals as simply a branch of numismatics, so that these often fine and imaginative works of art, rich in historical significance, once again come to be seen as an integral part of the broader history of sculpture. The ten essays function collectively as a general survey of the Scaglia collection, exploring particular facets, for example specific artists such as Sperandio di Bartolommeo Savelli (c.1425/28–c.1504) (by Marcello Calogero) and Maffeo Olivieri (1484–after 1543) (by Luca Siracusano), as well as broader themes, such as the portrait in medals and in sculpture in sixteenthcentury Emilia Romagna (by David Lucidi) or seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Rome (by Camilla Parisi). Two more essays explore the particularly significant role of medals in Lombardy in the sixteenth century (by Zaccariotto) and, a century later, in the Baroque period (by Susanna Zanuso). Ludovic Jouvet gives an excellent summary of the fortuna critica of the medal in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, showing how dependent this was on the extent to which successive monarchs regarded them as useful propagandistic tools. In sixteenth-century Lombardy on the other hand, the imperial Habsburg rulers, Charles V and his son Philip II, were hardly ever present in their Italian domains. Zaccariotto makes some especially interesting points about the impact this had on portraiture in Milan and the popularity of these easily transportable portraits among the transient population of often foreign administrators and soldiers, who dominated the city’s elites. 

Following these longer essays is a series of twenty mainly short contributions, which focus on just one or two medals. They allow fuller discussion of biographical and historical contexts, for instance the sixteenth-century French diplomat Charles de Solier (by Clara Seghesio); Lorenzo de’ Medici’s close supporter Giuseppe Colombini as depicted in a hitherto unrecorded medal (c.1488; cat. no.75) here attributed to Adriano Fiorentino (by Paolo Parmiggiani); and the late sixteenth-century Venetian soldier Mario Bonelli, in another previously unknown medal (after 1572; no.170) attributed to Martino Pasqualigo (by Luca Annibali). Other short essays offer broader insights into groups of medals, for example Virna Ravaglia on sixteenth-century portraits of young women in Florence and Emilia Romagna or Rosa Maria Villani’s technical analysis of a fifteenth-century medal of Pope Paul II (1466–67; no.92). 

Several contributors employ sculptures and paintings to provide further context, such as Jacopo Ranzani on the portraits of Giovan Battista Moroni (1520–78), which he uses to help place an anonymous Lombard medal (1554; no.262) of an as yet unidentified young man, or Lucia Simonato, who explores the relationship between the painter Filippo Lauri (1623–94) and the medallist François Chéron (1639–98). In a number of cases, paintings or sculptures are used to support new attributions of both medals and sculpture, for example Marco Scansani’s attribution of a terracotta statue of the Ferrarese churchman Giovanni Tavelli to Antonio Marescotti (active 1444–62) through comparison with the portrait on Marescotti’s medal (1446; no.13). It is an open question to what extent the often very small portraits in medals can really be used to attribute larger images of the same sitter, especially if the subject was well known in his or her lifetime. Nevertheless, the willingness in this catalogue to think anew and, where appropriate, challenge historic assumptions is commendable. 

The catalogue volume by Zaccariotto starts with an introductory essay surveying the collecting of medals from the early twentieth century to the present day. Medals from many major collections have found their way into the Scaglia collection, not least an important group formerly in the historic Chigi collection, recorded in an inventory in 1674 and dispersed at auction as recently as 1974–75. The catalogue itself is organised chronologically and geographically, broadly following the traditional ordering established by earlier generations of scholars. The concise but informative entries consist of descriptions, provenance information and principal bibliographic references; they are accompanied by excellent colour images of both the obverse and reverse of the medals, reproduced at actual size. The bibliographic sections include, where appropriate, brief summaries of significant previous attributions, insights or opinions, making the entries extremely useful starting points for study of any particular medal. 

With its solid catalogue supported and enhanced by a series of essays that bring a range of fresh perspectives to the subject, this is a landmark publication, which will be of lasting scholarly value. The two substantial volumes can also, thanks to the collector’s generosity, be bought for an astonishingly reasonable price, which puts them within the reach of anyone with a specialist or more general interest in the subject. It is to be hoped that more young scholars will be encouraged to pay closer attention to medals, which at their best are important works of art that are also windows onto history.  

[1] F. Rossi: La Collezione Mario Scaglia: Placchette, Bergamo 2011; reviewed by the present author in this Magazine, 153 (2011), pp.746–47.