Introduction

There are several themes which run through the papers in this volume, the most striking of which is the importance of context to an understanding of the medal. Since its inception in the Renaissance by Pisanello, the medal has always had a rather clearly defined definition—it is a piece of relief sculpture, usually round, of suitable dimensions for holding in the hand. Its two faces are intended to relate to each other artistically and symbolically; the obverse usually presents a visual representation of the subject while the reverse bears a symbolic representation. There have been, of course, medals which have departed from this definition, but surprisingly few. Often such apparent departures have been brought about by curators and scholars who have, for the sake of variety or context, included such objects as plaques and coins in shows and studies of medals. Artists, on the other hand, have usually taken delight in the rigorous formality of the medium.

Despite its very specific definition, the medal is all but totally defined by its milieu. Perhaps more than any other art form besides architecture, the medal is tightly linked to the social context from which it proceeds. The simple truth is that no one really knows what to do with a medal once it has been made. Indian chiefs may have worn them around their necks, but the rest of us have to decide whether to use them as paperweights, search for a display stand for them, or slide them into a drawer with other significant but nonfunctional mementos. But this seeming lack of function hasn't kept institutions from sponsoring the production of medals, artists from designing them, or the public from treasuring them.

In the papers collected here, we can see a change in who has initiated the production of medals and the reasons for their creation. In the colonial period, the medal was chiefly a vehicle for a European power, be it Spain, France, or England, to advertise its dominance among its American subjects. The medal figured above all as a mark of initiation; it was at the time of coronation of a new ruler or the entry into alliance of Indian tribes that medals most frequently were distributed. The portrait of the ruler stood for the power of his armies, an identification that had been promulgated by Louis XIV a century earlier.

The Libertas Americana medal was also consciously designed to mark a new beginning. Benjamin Franklin and his associates were actively searching for symbolism to represent a totally new nation. To avoid contemporary royal imagery, they borrowed symbols and quotations from the Roman Republican tradition as it was understood in their day, not without running into the problems connected with slavery that had plagued so many efforts of the new republic.

In the nineteenth century, Indian Peace Medals and Presidential Inaugurations served as the impetus for many of the official medals, but increasingly other institutions and even individuals sought the prestige that came from an image propagated in gold, silver or bronze. In this context, the identification that exists between medals and coins is significant. Though the earliest Renaissance medals were created by artists and craftsmen with no connection to coinage, many medals of the early modern period were created by the same artists who designed coins and were even struck at the same mints. Moreover, the format of the medal closely parallels that of the coin, reinforcing the identification of the two media. In a medal, the president of an American corporation or society could receive the numismatic recognition offered to foreign rulers and, after 1909, to the most illustrious of past national presidents.

The great international expositions of the turn of this century were a vital forum for introducing the public to art in general and especially to recent developments in other countries. The one work of art that the average fair-goer could bring home as a physical souvenir was a medal. No country was more identified with the early universal expositions than France, and its art came to dominate American fairs as well; the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 is recognized as a critical point in the dissemination of French influence, under the rubric of Beaux-Arts style, into American art of all media. The French schools themselves served as the training ground for the most important of American medalists: the sculptors Saint-Gaudens, French, Flanagan and Brenner stand out in this regard. The name of Saint-Gaudens constantly recurs in discussion of later American Beaux-Arts medalists; through his teachings at the Art Students League and his training of many apprentices and assistants, he transmitted his approach to the medal to a whole generation of medalists. American artists were quick to put their own mark on the medium, through the use of indigenous subjects, but also through a distinctive vigor and looseness of modeling and the adoption of specifically formats.

Among medalists who became active in the first years of this century, the medal also became a convenient medium for personal enterprise. Janet Scudder set up a studio in Paris to make small portrait plaquettes of visiting Americans; framed like paintings, these deluxe souvenirs of the Grand Tour were easily portable and could be distributed in multiple copies. Bela Pratt made extra copies of a commissioned portrait as a speculative venture. Theodore Spicer-Simson produced a whole series of medallions of famous authors as a commercial venture.

The twentieth century saw the entrance of another party into the process of the creation of medals—the collector. Already in the early years of the century, John Cotton Dana had sponsored the production of medals for the benefit of a museum and its constituents. It was with such groups as the Circle of Friends of the Medallion and its successor, the Society of Medalists, that the collectors themselves took the lead in sponsoring medallic creation. But, as with so many aspects of the American medal, such enterprises had their origins in the early days of the medium, when Italian Renaissance princes and Nuremburg burghers sponsored the creation of medals to fill their collections.

The American medal has moved in its own directions, adopting imagery and styles befitting its role as a colony, then republic, removed geographically from other homes of the medal. But apart from its specific geographical and political context, the medal in America has shared the social, economic, and artistic contexts of medals since the Renaissance and has made its own contributions to this shared tradition.

Alan M. Stahl, Conference Chair