Previous articleNext article FreeHierarchies of Value: The Medallist’s Work in Sixteenth-Century ArtCaylen Ferguson HeckelCaylen Ferguson HeckelUniversity of Toronto Mississauga, Ontario, Canada Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn December 1550, Leone Leoni wrote a letter to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, imperial minister of Emperor Charles V, in which Leoni describes a model for a commission of a large-scale bronze statue of the emperor, seeking approval for his concept of a second figure of Fury, restrained and cowering at the base (fig. 1).1 Emphasizing its compositional complexity and emotional impact, Leoni expresses sadness that Granvelle cannot see the model—for if he could, Leoni says, Granvelle would love him more than he does already and would see him as other than a medallist.2 Leoni had, until then, made most of his living making portrait medals and working at the imperial mint in Milan. He saw this commission of a large-scale bronze as an opportunity to shift how he was perceived by his patrons. He was right; the finished sculpture led to even more ambitious commissions, eventually making Leoni one of the wealthiest artists of his time. Yet, though his letter seems to suggest a yearning for more fame and recognition than that accorded to medallists, once this ambition was achieved, Leoni continued working as a medallist, remaining at the mint for years after this sculpture was completed. In fact, he stayed for a decade, even after he was knighted by Charles V. Though Leoni’s letter suggests a derogatory connotation of being seen as merely a medallist, if we suspend the hierarchy that puts sculptors above medallists—the very hierarchy that Leoni’s career calls into question—we see a complex network of values emerge that shed light on the role of medallists within prevailing discourses of sixteenth-century art.Figure 1. Leone Leoni and Pompeo Leoni, Emperor Charles V and the Fury, Milan, 1551–55. Bronze, height: 251 cm; width: 143 cm; base/bottom: 130 cm; weight: 825 kg. Copyright of the image Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, NY.Because coins functioned as official objects of the state, we tend to see them now as having limited artistic value. Medals, on the other hand, afforded more innovation in style and imagery not only because they were less constrained by state power but also because they were historically larger and cast instead of struck.3 However, many sixteenth-century goldsmiths experimented with the techniques that typically distinguished the categories, such that by midcentury, most medals were struck instead of cast.4 Furthermore, the influx of silver into many European states drove the production of new denominations of silver coins (such as Benvenuto Cellini’s ricci for Alessandro de’ Medici; fig. 2), which were often similar in size to contemporary medals.5 Though their functions remained distinct, these changes made the artistic affordances of coins and medals more similar to each other in the sixteenth century than at any time prior in the early modern period. Rather than isolating coin makers from medal makers, it is worth attending to the capaciousness of the term “medallist”—to where the edges of the categories of coin maker and medal maker blur, and to how their relationship to each other was open to active manipulation within recognizable hierarchies of value in sixteenth-century art.Figure 2. Benvenuto Cellini, forty soldi coin, known as ricci, with the head of Alessandro de’ Medici (obverse) and Sts. Cosmas and Damian (reverse), Florence, ca. 1535. Silver, diameter: 2.88 cm; gross weight: 8.24 gr. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection.In his treatise on goldsmithing, Benvenuto Cellini troubles the categories of coins and medals by reconfiguring their relationship to each other. Cellini begins his section on medals by invoking an ancient precedent: when a ruler came to power, all masters of craft would make a medal for the occasion, with the ruler’s head on one side and a commemorative deed or honor on the other. The winner of this medal competition was awarded the Mastership of the Mint, that is, Cellini says, the making of dies for coins.6 Whether he believed this false story true, knew it as myth, or made it up himself, it can, in part, be seen as a recuperative attempt to raise the artistic value of coins by inverting their function—turning medals into currency to be exchanged for a job at the mint.7However, this story also reinforces the hierarchy between medals and coins that it means to disrupt. In fact, this inversion relies on the artistic value of medals. This value is represented by the concept of the ancient medal competition. By the mid-sixteenth century, not only were artists widely understood to be in competition with the ancients, but competition between contemporaries was central to the production of Renaissance art. Cellini and Leoni both had firsthand experience: their rivalry began with a contest at the invitation of Pietro Bembo to Padua, though both resultant portrait medals are lost.For sixteenth-century medallists, rivalries and competitions were not only about winning commissions but also about gaining status, making their work inextricable from concepts of masculine honor.8 For example, in 1540, when Leoni was working at the papal mint, he attacked its inspector, who was said to have been bragging about an affair with Leoni’s wife. The personal and professional not only collided in the famous medal he made for Andrea Doria for freeing him from the consequent punishment in the papal galleys (fig. 3) but also in the campaign of letters that preceded his release. Not only was Leoni’s victim an infamous forger, writes Leoni’s friend Giustiniani in a letter to Pietro Aretino, but the imbrication of Leoni’s wife meant that Leoni was justified in defending his honor—for who has not done the same?9 Indeed, this type of argument was often successful in gaining commutations for violent crimes throughout Italy at the time. However, such defenses were only successful for men of standing; you could only defend your honor if you had it in the first place.10 Through this understanding of honor as a prerequisite for competition and conflict, values of masculinity were reincorporated into discourses of artistic value. As an expression of possessing honor, competition pervaded the personality of the artist. In this way, artists’ self-fashioning paralleled the fashioning of visual art into a liberal art, itself transformed by a series of discursive “competitions”: between colore and disegno, between sculpture and painting, between art and nature.Figure 3. Leone Leoni, medal with Andrea Doria (obverse) and self-portrait and manacles (reverse), Milan, 1541. Bronze, diameter: 4.26 cm; gross weight: 34.33 gr. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection.But if the spirit of competition in Cellini’s story raised the artistic value of medal-making and incorporated it into discourses of masculine honor, the structures of compensation associated with the winner’s position as master engraver at the mint were at odds with such a noble system of value. Engravers at the mint were expected to produce tangible results of their labor in the form of dies, which held the designs for coins and from which coins were stamped. In Cellini’s day, this position paid a monthly salary, sometimes with added monetary incentives. For example, during his time as master of the dies at the papal mint (1529–31), Cellini earned an additional ducat for every three dies produced.11 The set price per every three dies also shows that the job itself, once obtained, was not one that could easily reward such subjective things as artistic innovation since it was instead primarily concerned with volume.The position at the mint therefore diverged from the types of economies of labor and compensation that transformed the status of the artist during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from craftsman to humanist and finally to courtier.12 The gift economy was integral to this newfound status, something that both Leoni and Cellini understood well, though they did not use that knowledge with similar efficacy. Leoni gave portrait medals of Charles V’s children as gifts to the emperor in 1549. In turn, Charles gave Leoni a knighthood and further promises of patronage. This form of compensation elevated the status of the artist in part because it relied on, and could reflect, the patron’s erudition. This reciprocal, albeit uneven, cocreation of prestige meant that artistic value once again intersected with honor, this time in the form of patronage. It also meant that much was at stake when one side did not fulfill the unspoken rules. In his autobiography, Cellini describes how Cosimo I continually neglected properly recognizing his talent, declaring the duke more a merchant than a prince. Cellini is able thus to justify his own lack of patronage through Cosimo’s lack of princeliness, the insult resting on a conception of art as not a measurable commodity. Cellini’s regret—if only “I had been cunning enough to secure by contract all I wanted for my work”13—rather ironically reintroduces an idea of contract, responding in the language of merchants to the prince’s failure.If understanding art as a measurable commodity is the purview of merchants, then coins are doubly so. Tangible and transactional objects, their value rested on confidence in the value of their material. The value of artistic objects, however, was becoming more divorced from the market values of their materials. In an extraordinary example, Vasari recounts the story of Michelangelo demanding seventy ducats for the finished Doni Tondo. The patron thought this too much and paid forty instead. Evidently offended, Michelangelo then demanded not seventy, but one hundred ducats. The patron was then willing to agree to the original seventy, but Michelangelo now wanted one hundred and forty ducats or the painting back. As Alexander Nagel argues, this episode, whether real or fabricated, shows that by the time Vasari was writing in the 1550s, there was an understanding of arbitrariness in the pricing of art.14 In this scenario, though Michelangelo’s position to negotiate on the basis of ego and honor was exceptional, it remains true that the monetary value of the painting changes drastically while the material facts of the painting do not—a sentiment evidenced by the circulation of Vasari’s tale. Coins themselves could never be leveraged in this way. Their value as objects relied on their function, enabled by consensus as to their material value.Let us return to Leoni’s aspirations with which I began. He may indeed have been expressing his desire to be seen as a sculptor, but the aspirations expressed in his letter do not lie with the not-yet-realized bronze. He writes, “It pains me that Your Most Illustrious Lordship cannot see my model [mia machina],” locating the value of his work not in the prospect of the finished product but in the tangible form of its design. Recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of the “factorylike” aspects of sculptors’ workshops such as those of Cellini and later Giambologna.15 Sculptors excelled in managerial things, employing various skilled laborers to cast, clean, and chase bronzes. Though it preceded Leoni’s career as a sculptor, the letter to Granvelle already suggests an understanding that the role and prestige of the sculptor lay more in the design than the execution of the work.Likewise, the value of the work done by the master of the dies does not reside in the finished product, the coin, but in the die. In most established mints, a series of workers were involved in the process, including assayers, who measured and maintained the fineness of metals, and cutters and blanchers, who turned sheets of metal into circular blanks. Coins were finally transformed into their recognizable form—with obverse and reverse—by the strikers, who were the lowest in the mint hierarchy, doing the job that demanded the most physical labor with the least amount of skill. The master of the dies’s role in this process was to engrave and oversee the dies that were then used by the strikers. Yet the master engraver, Cellini tells us, should not engrave directly on the die; instead, he should create his designs on punches—not just for lettering, but also for individual figures—an innovation that maintains the master’s design throughout the long and iterative process of coin-making.16 Cellini brings the importance of this delineation of labor to full force in his autobiography when he describes an argument with a sculptor who said goldsmiths are not capable of designing coins themselves; Cellini denies this with a threatening play on words that brings dies not only into hierarchies of artistic value but imbues them with disegno itself.17Though much has been written about Cellini’s self-fashioning, in rejecting the idea that a goldsmith needs help from a sculptor to design coins, he may not be attempting to raise the prestige of goldsmiths over that of sculptors but rather making a claim for their distinctiveness. Though the role of sculptor was similar to the role of die engraver, it remained paramount that both functioned in similar positions within separate hierarchies of labor. In fact, Leoni’s hope that he would rise in Granvelle’s esteem if the minister could see his model does not rest on being seen as better than a medalist but “of a mind other than that of medalist” (altro animo che da medaglista).18The “other than” of Leoni’s letter too easily becomes a “more than” to the modern reader, who might place the sculptor above the medal maker—and indeed, the medal maker above the coin maker. Yet this hierarchy, when examined through the systems of value most prevalent in the sixteenth century—the gift economy, masculine honor, arbitrary remuneration, and disegno—reveals the work of the medallist to be no faint copy of that of the sculptor but rather its own complex site of meaning-making.Notes1. Eugène Plon, Les maitres Italiens au service de la maison d’Autriche: Leone Leoni sculpteur de Charles-Quint et Pompeo Leoni sculpteur de Philippe II (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1887), 362 (doc. no. 21): “Io spasimo di dollore che V. S. Illma non possi uedere quella mia machina, per che son certo che mi amereste più che non fate, parendoui uedere altro animo che da medaglista.”2. Bruce Edelstein, “Leone Leoni, Benvenuto Cellini, and Francesco Vinta, a Medici Agent in Milan,” Sculpture Journal 4 (2000): 35–45.3. Philip Attwood, “Cellini’s Coins and Medals,” in Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor, Goldsmith, Writer, ed. Margaret Gallucci and Paolo Rossi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 110.4. Alan M. Stahl, “Mint and Medal in the Renaissance,” in Perspectives on the Renaissance Medal: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance, ed. Stephen K. Scher (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 140.5. Ibid., 140–41.6. Benvenuto Cellini, The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture, trans. C. R. Ashbee (London: E. Arnold, 1898), 72.7. Objects widely accepted during the Renaissance as ancient medals are large ancient coins or Franco-Flemish pendants; see Stephen K. Scher, “An Introduction to the Renaissance Portrait Medal,” in Scher, Perspectives on the Renaissance Medal, 3–4.8. For an examination of this topic, see Beth L. Holman, “For ‘Honor and Profit’: Benvenuto Cellini’s Medal of Clement VII and His Competition with Giovanni Bernardi,” Renaissance Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2005): 512–75.9. Jacopo Giustiniani to Pietro Aretino, May 16, 1540, reprinted in Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino, ed. Gonaria Floris and Luisa Mulas (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 2: no. 98.10. John K. Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537–1609 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 303.11. Cellini, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Written by Himself, trans. John Addington Symonds (London: Phaidon, 1949), 89.12. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 122.13. Cellini, Life, 331.14. Alexander Nagel, “Art as Gift: Liberal Arts and Religious Reform in the Renaissance,” in Negotiating the Gift: Pre-modern Figurations of Exchange, ed. Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 319–21.15. Michael Cole, in particular, has alerted us to this phenomenon; see Cole, Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), and Cole, “Universality, Professionalism, and the Workshop: Cellini in Florence, 1545–1562,” in Gallucci and Rossi, Benvenuto Cellini, 53–70.16. Cellini, Treatises, 69.17. Cellini, Vita di Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Orazio Bacci (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1901), 96: “io non havevo bisogno di sua disegni per l’arte mia; ma che io speravo bene con qualche tempo, che con i mia disegni io darei noia a l’arte sua.”18. Leoni, cited in Plon, Les maitres Italiens, 362. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 41, Number 2Winter 2022 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719457 Views: 175Total views on this site © 2022 Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.