Head-on-a-platter and Dattari toning

Congrats Severus , beautifull Maximinus II Daia Serapis ex Dattari !
Nice collection all together, me like it, great provenance.

Here's my toned Maximian I Herculius I recently bought:

 

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WOW, SevA-- those are all wonderful but I particularly love the Serapis-on-platter coin.

As for your theory, hmm. Maybe... I've only accumulated Dattari's Roman Egypt coins, and their patinas look nothing like the beautiful finish of your coins. Many of the ex Dattari Egyptian coins are BD-ridden and nasty. I wonder what they looked like when he bought them? Have they suffered from time and neglect, perhaps in a dank basement? Did he clean them with an acidic compound which caused harm over the decades? Since the only images are of pencil rubbings, it's difficult to compare today's condition to that of a hundred-plus years ago.

 

I am not saying you are wrong but Dattari bought coins found in Egypt where there was not water needed to form patinas of the type seen elsewhere. We need to distinguish between 100 year old retoning and what you get in many centuries with no humidity.

Ex Dattari coins:
I do suspect this Commodus copper was fully cleaned long ago.

The last was cleaned in the 1980's starting it over in the toning game. You sure can tell the difference.

 

Some of my Dattari coins have been cleaned to the bone. By their previous owner, Dattari himself, or the person he bought them from, I have no idea. On the other hand, some others look like they were barely touched after having been unearthed. I'd be kind of hesitant to call anything 'Dattari toning'.

Two ex Dattari A-Pi tets to illustrate:

 

As I understand it, Dattari bought coins by the bucket at a time when the finders could find few other markets. Most recently we had the absolute dregs of his collection sold by a Gemini auction. I suspect his better items were beautiful but his scholarly works did not care whether a coin came perfect from a pot buried in sand or washed up on the shore of the Nile in a flood. As long as it was different, it made the study collection. What happened to the common duplicates? It would be interesting to know the history of each of our coins but many of what we consider treasures today probably only survived because they contained too little silver to make it worth starting up a fire.

 

Wow, thanks for all the thoughtful comments and the beautiful coins! (@maridvnvm's stupendous heads-on-platters, love that toning @Andres2 [but isn't that Galerius?], and Doug's Domna tet with the quadriga particularly stand out for me.)

Some thoughts on the toning question: @Theodosius is surely right that these coins were never patinated. So is it 1800-year-old toning, or century retoning? I'm still leaning towards the latter, although your various arguments have got me if not sitting on the fence, then busy climbing it.

Why do I still lean towards retoning? (Besides the backfire effect!) The toning on the Dattari folles and antoniniani is quite unusual, departing from the norm even for the Alexandria mint. If it was just a function of the dryness in Egypt (though note that Alexandria itself is far from dry!), you'd expect to see this on more coins from there. Or if it was characteristic of a certain sealed hoard found in special conditions, you wouldn't expect so many of Dattari's coins to have it. (Unless most of his folles and antoniniani did indeed come from a particular hoard. But that seems unlikely.) Instead, I think he bought unpatinated coins with thin, even brown toning–coins that most people wouldn't think of cleaning–and cleaned them. That would explain the prevalence in his collection of the iridescent coppery toning, and its scarcity otherwise.

So what about all the Dattari tets that lack this toning? Hmmm... good point! Here's a stab at an explanation: the fabric of Alexandrian tets is very different from the ants and folles, and doesn't lend itself to being corrosion free for 1800 years. Since they lacked the smooth brown surfaces, maybe Dattari typically treated them differently. Or even if he treated them the same (as noted, some of them do seem to have been cleaned down to bare metal; CNG sold a whole bunch like this over a decade ago), their different fabric meant they didn't retone in the same way.

 

Was looking at the first two myself, missed the auction though

 

In any case, one thing is clear: I have utterly failed to coin a new CT term!!

 

Phew!

 

I had probably 20 coins bookmarked, but by the time I got to work, all those lots were gone, anyway, most of them were over the price I was willing to pay. Anyhow, congrats on the nice addition Sev Alex.!

 

This is just my speculation, but I don't see Dattari spending very much of his time attempting to clean and conserve his coins. Perhaps some of his sources did. He was a prodigious collector of not just coins (13000+ catalogued provincial coins of Alexandria, 19000+ other Romans, and more) but art as well. He acquired much of it within a decade, and if anything he probably spent the time studying and cataloguing rather than cleaning.

As an unrelated aside, David Vagi in his book repeats a story about Dattari sending "thousands" of Alexandrian tetradrachms of Nero to the melting pot because they were so common and undesirable that they were worth more to him for their bullion value .

 

That melting pot story gives me the heebie jeebies!!

You may be right. Or he may have paid some poor guy a pittance to give 'em a quick acid bath and rinse.

 

Stories about the Arras hoard (now refuted) used to send shivers down my spine.

 

Had to look that one up. I'm glad to hear it's doubtful that any of the medallions were melted!

 

Thanks, @Severus Alexander ! So how do you like these (where brass is still brass and an As still an As) ?

 

A couple of real beauties!! So are you going to pick up a couple Dattari LRBs?