A Museum That Values its Ancient Coin Collection

Wow very nice thanks for sharing!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

That is a beautiful collection of coins and what contributes to the beauty is the superb method they have been displayed. Excellent photos—as usual— of the coins and ruins, Curtisimo!

 

Fascinating images, Bart9349! Thank you for posting them!

 

It's not a bad effort considering they may have had a small budget to work with. The exhibit panels are nicely designed. Too bad they couldn't provide more funding for the exhibit. Thanks for posting your images Bart9349!

 

I'm not sure that I disagree with their attitude. Museums are businesses. A few are tax supported but even those have to pander to popular desires to justify their funding. In times past, it seemed appropriate for government to tell people what they should find interesting - what was good for you - but now we count many bodies that want to see the leather jacket Fonzie wore on Happy Days and don't want to know about coins or, for that matter, old stuff. Many of the people I have met in coin clubs think Indian Head cents are 'ancient' because they are older than they can remember spending. Should we spend tax money building museums and paying curators so show things tax payers don't want to see? The answer to that has changed in my lifetime. We will never agree on what government should be doing on bigger things than coins. What hope is there for coins?

These days we have a new option for plastic replica food/coins. Modern museums are spending a small part of their budget putting up web sites where the entire world can see a million items from their collection for what previously was spent on a selection of items for people living close to their brick and mortar space. I will never travel to the British Museum or a thousand smaller ones in places farther than I will travel so these websites are the museums of my personal future. My personal best interests would be served by people not being able to give away their coins but just sending them to market where I can buy the ones the rest of you don't want worse than I do.

 

Having such large collections readily available online makes research so much easier! It wasn't that long ago if you wanted to see a certain specimen in the BM you had to travel to do so, or pay for a photo. I'm glad those days are gone!

 

I concur.

 

Great pics @Curtisimo and all. The best collection I've seen was in the Paolo Orsi Archaeological Museum in Syracuse. The whole museum is full of treasures, the coin collection is in a basement vault. Photography wasn't allowed in the basement, but the coins, mostly Sicilian Greek coins, are well displayed and fabulous. There were 29 Syracuse decadrachms in one cabinet alone and two stunning Catane tetradrachms - facing head of Apollo by Herakleidas. My dream coin used to be the Kimon tetradrachm of Syracuse (which they had), but the Catane tetradrachm looked better in the flesh, so that's what I'm buying when the lottery numbers come up! Well worth a visit if in Sicily. Aidan.

 

At the Walters Art Museum here in Baltimore, there is a permanent exhibit called the Chamber of Wonders that recreates the sort of collection that a cultured 17th century European gentleman would be expected to display. It is a glorious hodgepodge of ancient-to-(17th century) modern art and artifacts, animal trophies, minerals, fossils, and other natural and artificial objects. Naturally, part of the collection is a group of ancient coins. Here are some old and not-very-good photos, the first shows the main room and the other two show the coins.




Re: Donating items to a museum, I would also be frustrated if my donation were refused, but I can also understand why curators don't want their hands tied by terms in a donation agreement that limit their abilities to do what is best for the museum. Any museum collection requires staff and facilities to properly store, preserve, and catalogue it, and to make it available for study by experts; coins have additional security requirements due to their high resale value to theft susceptibility ratio. As someone who collects both coins and fossils, and loves the museums that display such things, I am also frustrated with the problems that museums face nowadays, but restricting what they can do with our donated items is not going to help them.

A good example is the story of the Barnes Foundation. It was founded by Albert Barnes, a wealthy businessman and avid art collector in Philadelphia who died in 1951, leaving a collection heavy in Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modernist art including Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and many others. Under the terms set for the Foundation in Barnes' will, the collection had to remain intact, displayed only in the exact positions Barnes had decreed, in the original building in an inconvenient Philadelphia suburb, and could not ever be loaned or traded. By the 1990s, the Foundation was in financial disarray, many in the art world were complaining that few people were being allowed to see the collection, and portions of the will were challenged. A few key paintings were loaned out for traveling exhibits, which generated useful funds and publicity, and eventually the Foundation agreed to move the collection to a new building in Philadelphia, near the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum, where it has been a major success. The art is still displayed in Mr. Barnes' arrangements, which show common themes across artworks from different artists or time periods, but now in a location that is easy to access. The collection has remained intact, and is now seen and appreciated by far more people, because the curators were finally given permission to move to a new location despite the original donor's wishes.

 

If you really want to help your museum and trust their management to do the best thing for the museum, sell your collection in the open market and donate the money to the museum without restrictions. IF they want to make an exhibit of your coins, you could allow them to remove from the sale coins that they want to 'buy' realizing that the cash they will receive in the end will be reduced by the value of the coins they chose not to sell. If they choose to spend your money on things you would not have considered appropriate (funding a curator for TV memorabilia comes to mind) perhaps you chose the wrong museum. If they decide to spend the money on a display and staff to devote to those few coins they retained from the sale and placed a single case devoted to your coins in a corner of the museum, you have done better than I can imagine ever happening.

 

For us ancient collectors with an appreciation of history—standing in the presence of something ancient and letting our imaginations take us back in time to where and when the objects were used—is an indescribable experience. We can stand in front of a display and imagine the hands that once held those coins. Others—the few who might stop for a second and look at the exhibit might say—"Wow, I bet those are worth something" and then move on. If you go to a museum and take note of what the public is standing in line to see—it would amaze you. I remember a trip to the Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology (Mr. @dougsmit mentions a similar example earlier in this post) and seeing a long line of people waiting to see Judy Garland's Ruby Slippers from the Wizard of Oz movie. I had no interest in seeing them so I walked a few feet around the corner and right there in front of me in a glass case with nobody else around was General George Washington's uniform that he had worn during the Battle of Princeton. I was full of awe and emotion at the site of the uniform of one of my heroes. I had the exhibit all to myself. The uniform that the Father of our Country wore while leading Continental troops against the British during our Revolution. He exposed himself to gunfire on numerous occasions during that battle. Riding between the battle lines and rallying his troops. Nobody was interested. They were all ogling the ruby slippers.

 

The Stanford art museum has a great collection of Ptolemaic and Roman tets of Alexandria, and the history museum in Amman, Jordan has a great collection of Roman, Seleucid, and Nabataen coins. Surprisingly, the Egyptian museum in Cairo has no coins on display.

 

I'm making plans to visit the house of @Bing. Gets great reviews on TripAdvisor.

Please have a Ham and Swiss on Pumpernickel and an UNsweet iced tea waiting for me.

 

Any time, but we rarely have pumpernickel around the house

 

Excellent write-up Parthicus! I love the Walters being a fellow "Balmer-ite" The Walters holds sentimental memories for me in that it's where my wife and I visited on our first date. I can identify with what you said about a having a donation refused and causing disappointment. I am fortunate to have not experienced a situation like that. The only donation that I've made —to a church where I had the honor of lecturing—was gladly accepted and is still on display in their visitors area today.

 

This is the soundest recommendation for two very important reasons: (1) by selling your coins, you create the best possibility that your coins continue to be valued and cherished by a like-minded collector; and (2) a museum that you support can use the money more readily than your coins.

Consider that the Metropolitan Museum of Art saw fit to sell the following coin at some point after they acquired it:



Surely, I value and appreciate this coin more than they did; I hate the thought that it would have been filed away in a drawer and rarely, if ever, displayed.

 

Breathtakingly beautiful coin, @IdesOfMarch01 ! All of your coins fall into a very special category. An area of numismatics that mine do not. While both of us collect ancients—mine are more in the category of dug or found artifacts where as yours are gems of numismatic art. Your coins definitely (if you were to bequeath them at some time) belong in an art museum or high end art gallery. This makes you a curator more than a collector.

 

When I was in Rome earlier this month, one of the places we visited was the
Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, one of the locations of the MNR (Museo Nazionale Romano). That palazzo has a great and well-presented collection of coins - see here. Attached are three photos: One shows models and dies, one features lots of bees on a gold coin and the last one is about ancient coin counterfeiters and their instruments ...

As I mentioned elsewhere, the Mint Museum that we visited is great too. Not only coins but also old presses and more. But you need to make an appointment to get in.

Christian

 

Great thread!

 

Altes Museum Berlin




Bode Museum, just a walk down the way from the Altes Museum. Also, Berlin.