Collecting tesserae has been an extremely rewarding venture for me. I am often able to acquire incredibly rare pieces bearing mythological and historical figures that are rarely seen elsewhere. In the context of the tesserae series as a whole, the following piece is not terribly exceptional. The shape and size is normal - circular, about 17-19mm. The obverse figure, Fortuna, is a common theme. But the reverse deity, while in a pose that is shared by most other gods and goddesses on tesserae, is notable. The figure is Silvanus, the Roman god of the forest and field, holding his scythe and tree branch. To my knowledge, the only numismatic appearance of Silvanus outside of the tesserae is on a handful of medallions of Hadrian, all from the same issue. ROME PB Tessera (17mm, 3.56 g, 12 h) Fortuna standing left, holding rudder and cornucopia Silvanus standing left, holding scythe and branch Rostovtsev 2977; München 368; BM 397; Paris 390; Kircheriano 922-4 Ex Kölner Münzkabinett Tyll Kroha 102 (5 December 2014), lot 406 A side note - I bid on this lot via SixBid, not expecting to win anything, so I was surprised and pleased when it hammered at €58, two below the estimate and twelve below my bid. Silly me had failed to realize that there was a 22% (!) buyer's fee on the sale. Coupling this with higher-than-average shipping costs and a paypal fee (they initially wanted a bank transfer), and I paid almost €30 more. Oh, and their invoices? Handwritten. Maybe if the firm modernized a little bit and got some proper invoicing software, they could lower their fees and attract more bidders. But that's none of my business.
Hi Ardy ... wow, that's a very cool addition (out-standing eye-appeal) Oh, and I hope that your Saturday is cruisin' along nicely ... (mine is good) Ummm, although I think that this sweetie has amazingly cool eye-appeal, unfortunately I'm a simpleton where these coins are concerned (and pretty much everywhere else too) ... anyway ... a tesserae, eh? ... so this is lead? ... it doesn't look like lead (but wow, it is awesome) Cheers
Very cool! I was wondering about the color as well. Is that common for lead? What other colors do tesserae come in?
It depends on what is alloyed with the lead, usually some copper and tin. Here are four of my Nabataean tesserae of varying shades. I think the more copper, the darker the color...
CNG's pics are very much lightened, and the color saturation is turned down. You've bought plenty of coins from them - compare their pics to the real thing.
Actually, I usually find that CNG's photos are pretty awesome => ummm, my photos on the other-hand ... not so awesome
This tan sort of color is a very common patina for lead. I'd say its about the equivalent of a nice green color on a bronze. I also have seen them in varying degrees of dark gray, and even some with a greenish tint. If the seller has a halfway decent photo, I usually just use theirs. I hate to bug my friends with my own coins, when they have hundreds of others to work on every day. What - you didn't think I actually shot these myself? HA! But this one is actually quite accurate to how the piece looks in hand. There are a lot of factors that go into how a coin patinates. Some of us are quite familiar with how bronze gets its color, but lead is an entirely different beast. I agree with you that the underlying composition of the metal has a great effect, but so does the soil in which the coin was deposited, as well as the cleaning method once it comes out of the ground. The modern-day environment in which the coin is stored can also affect color. Until I see metallurgical analyses of these pieces, I would hesitate to attribute it solely to metal content. Which coins have you bought? The vast, vast majority of them are really quite accurate. Silver can sometimes be a little too blue in the printed sales, which I think is so they appear correct in the catalog. Bronze can be a little dark at times and may have been over corrected.
Uh, well...you got me there. I can't seem to win an auction at CNG, but I do have some ex-CNG coins from other dealers. It seems to me that the saturation on pics of bronzes is tweaked down, which isn't a criticism, just an observation. My experience is you've got lighten up certain images and adjust the contrast, or you just don't see the details. Don't take my comment to mean anything negative about CNG pics - I think they're 100% professional.
The comment on silver being blue is interesting - I didn't realize there was an issue reproducing blue in print. Roma notoriously over-corrects for this as their coins are consistently very blue (and I don't believe they're traveling toward us... [Hubble's Law humor - I apologize]). CNG's photography is indeed very good at showing detail but everything does become fairly desaturated, making coins look nicer in person. I don't mind this attribute but it has lead to some (pleasant) surprises during lot viewing and certain coins going from "I'll try a bid or two" to "I need to aggressively pursue this."
Not pleasant of course, but ... well ... direct transfer is a really common way of paying here. You get the seller's account number, go to your bank's website and transfer the amount. Convenient for people around here (euro area), less convenient for others. (About the same as asking me to pay using something called check ...) But as long as a seller accepts other ways (PayPal, c/c), even with an extra charge, the payment will work. Kroha also has an MA-Shops webstore, just in case. Christian
