Collaborative Artisanship: Medals at Louis XIV’s Royal Mint

Abstract

During Louis XIV’s reign, royal medals were fabricated in a workshop called the Monnaie des Médailles, situated at the heart of artisanal production at the Louvre. Medals were produced by a series of men appointed by the king, but the Monnaie des Médailles achieved administrative perfection under master goldsmith Nicholas Delaunay, who transformed the workshop into a space of performative display, where the king’s most important visitors could marvel at the quality of medalmaking equipment and witness the process of medal striking. Although scholars of medals tend to attribute specific medals to individual artists, struck medals do not correspond to contemporary ideas about the work of art’s authorship. Here, we reconstruct six stages of making – design, modelling, production of punches, dies and flans, followed by striking – to elucidate the artisanal process and place these objects back into the hands of their producers.