Colosseum Sestertius - Opinions?

I read this lastnight and to see how much it went for, tooled no less, WOW

I am always willing to accept many faults with ancients, even moderns. But tooling is a major NO.

I could think of many things I could do with $106K.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

I would feel better about the matter if I had confidence in the truth of this supposition but I see the fact as that coin collecting is a matter of fashion and taste. Today we see some willing to pay premium prices for garishly toned silver dollar that, 50 years ago, would have been avoided or 'dipped' by most people. In the Renaissance it was considered quite appropriate to produce and collect replica medals to fill in for rare Roman originals. We call them 'Paduans' now. It is not at all impossible that 'artistically enhanced' coins will become more in demand that those with faults and missing details.

Oil paintings found with rips and blisters are routinely repaired and repainted in part to produce something to be displayed as an intact whole. Statues receive missing parts or even get cobbled together from assorted junk parts whether or not the parts were from the same original or even the same period. It is considered quite appropriate to glue together pottery shards and make a great looking pot with well concealed seams and modern patches (sometimes painted to match; sometimes not). For most of us, tooled coins are offensive because they look 'tooled'. This really means that they were poorly done by amateur toolers. When these people perfect their skills, will people prefer their restorations to the item before they touched it. I say almost certainly. Specialists with years of experience in the field will be able to tell the difference but billionaires did not become billionaires by studying coin repair. It is already hard to find some coins in untouched state (Colosseum is one here as is Judaea Capta). I do not see this improving as long as there are people with $100,000 to spend on a coin who do not care or, worse, prefer the enhanced version.

I am not a sculpture expert. I own not a single statue or nose broken from one. My local art museum recently removed from display a full length statue of Caligula 'for study'. When I first saw it, I considered it obvious that the body was newer than the head. Now when you go to the museum, they offer a pamphlet explaining where the seams are.
http://virginiamuseum.blogspot.com/2013/02/caligula-loses-his-head.html

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v12n2/gallery/schertz_p/caligula.shtml
Are coins of the $100,000 class following in the path previously trod by million dollar statues? When they determine that part of all of Caligula's body is a thousand years newer than his head, how will it effect the value of the statue. Full length statues of Caligula are really rare. This used to be one. Is it still? Is Pluto a planet?

 

"Wow man, that's deep" as Cheech Marin might say. But you are most probably correct.

 

After reading this thread a couple of times now, I am pretty firmly convinced I am going to close my HA account. I refuse to support a firm who will not call out such a gross defect on an auction lot. It simply makes me uncomfortable in trusting them to buy ANY coin from them.

 

Nobody can know the future, but it's my belief (as well as my hope) that numismatists will always value untouched and untooled coins more highly than those that have been re-engraved. Even novices eventually realize that untouched coins are more desirable than manipulated coins.

As for the possibility that in the future it may become impossible to distinguish well-tooled coins from untooled coins, there is always the coin's provenance/pedigree upon which one can rely. Forgeries and fakes have always been an unfortunate element of art/coin/stamp collecting, and especially in the art world experts have been fooled many times, so knowledge and expertise remain the best defenses against being duped by high-quality forgeries.

Nevertheless, I remain very wary of the trend to ignore or gloss over tooling when evaluating ancient coins.

 

This is an interesting thread. Years ago I purchased a very nice looking, rare but tooled, Vespasian sestertius. The tooling was very well done, relatively minor and confined to enhancing the reverse legend.
It didn't matter to me at first but over time it began to bother me and rather than enjoy the coin when I held it, I would find myself examining it to see if there may have been more tooling than I originally thought.
I finally could take it no more, decided to sell it with full disclosure and ended up with a 10% profit to boot. The buyer told me he preferred the "higher quality" of my coin over the roughness of a non-tooled example he was considering at the same price. This was a four digit coin, I was amazed how quickly it sold.
My rule now is minor smoothing perhaps for a very rare coin, but never tooling.

 

I have the same rule, I can put up with smoothing but never tooling. Once a coin is tooled it no longer is an authentic ancient in my book.

 

Well written. This pretty much succinctly sums up why I would never knowingly buy a tooled coin. There would always be that little voice in the back of my head telling me that it just wasn't really an authentic coin. I can only hope all collectors eventually come to the same insight -- yes, even the individual who purchased the Vespasian sestertius from you and was happy with it when he/she bought it.

 

I also hate owning coins which I know have been doctored. Yes, I appreciate that most ancients have been cleaned at one point in their life, but seeing substantial differences between the most recent sales of a coin causes me to walk away.

At the CICF show yesterday, a very large US dealer was offering me a coin he just purchased in a sale a month ago. I was considering bidding on it myself but decided to go after a different example, coming up shortly after. He told me that he took the coin, dropped it in ammonia for 30 seconds, and now has "added a lot of value". He paid $25K and, with a straight face, was trying to sell it to me for $70K. The $25K price was already strong: it sold one year earlier for $15K and one year before that for $8K.

This behavior is toxic to the hobby.

 

This one resides in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

http://www.coinsweekly.com/en/Archive/8?&id=1304&type=n

 

A dealer asking for as much as he can is to be expected. The toxic behavior is when people pay the price because they do not care about the money and don't know that they could buy another, better elsewhere. When they lose interest, the coins will sell for whatever they are bringing then - perhaps double, perhaps half. A dealer will take his cut and this, too, is as it should be expected.