This is certainly an, ahem, unusual way of displaying this fairly high quality collection. Their own description: "The coins are mounted in a matching pair of nineteenth-century gold bracelets that are also decorated with oblong amethysts en cabochon. The jewelry was inspired by the early second-century A.D. writer Suetonius' biographies of the first twelve rulers of imperial Rome, which started with Julius Caesar and ended with Domitian. One bracelet contains aurei of the dictator Julius Caesar and the Julio-Claudian emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, the other has coins of the emperors of the civil war in A.D. 69—Galba, Otho, and Vitellius—and the Flavian emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian." Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of C. Ruxton Love Jr., 1967 I suppose if you wanted to impress your friends with two of the world's most valuable gold bracelets, this would be one way to do so.
Very, very nice bracelets, but a shame to display these beauties as gawdy jewelry. On the reverse of the Galba coin, there are modern numbers either stamped or etched in red. If this is a permanent defacement, it is shameful. Having said all that, I would love to have the means to won these two bracelets.
The red lettering is also on the Caesar coin and gives the accession number of the item in some museum. With one that complex, I suspect we could find out which museum did it. A number starting "67." might provide a year date and since the item is listed as "Gift of C. Ruxton Love Jr., 1967" we will have to pronounce the guilty party the Met. I have coins marked in 'museum red' an consider the practice a bit like I consider graffiti on the walls of natural places. You can get away with a lot if you are a museum or father of your country but we better not catch guys named Bing trying it. "Fools' names and fools' faces often appear in public places." 18 - I suffer, too, just like an aureus would. At Natural Bridge, Virginia, where George Washington was surveying at the time...
Oh the coinmanity! I wouldn't mind having replicas in such a setting. Probably wouldn't wear them though. At least they look well-crafted.
I've seen this bracelet at the Met and was quite disappointed in it. The bracelet itself looks like it was made intelligently, so as to not require edge manipulations to the coins, so they're likely in good condition. I'd suggest that they take the coins out, photograph them in their entirety, then perhaps put them back in and make more of a display about it, rather than keep them sequestered away in a hardly accessible corridor of the museum.
I have expressed before a dislike of museums as we now know them. Even the best feel the need to show coins as second class exhibits if they show them at all. These two photos were taken by my wife when she visited the British Museum. They show coins not good enough to make the cut as exhibits on their own heaped up. Are they glued together? The British Museum is the best coin museum there is. They recently have posted thousands of photos of Republican coin in their collection so they can be seen and enjoyed by people like me who will never even be in their country. I love the British Museum catalogs I own. Still they display coins like this. The other hundreds of thousands of coins certainly could not be displayed in a way a coin fanatic would like due to space and cost. Photos would seem to be the only answer. I agree with AJ but point out that the bracelet really says more about the age of excess which made the coins into jewelry than it does about antiquity. One of those coins looks like it could be Boscoreale. Today we see quite a few aurei and solidi marked 'ex jewelry' so perhaps being made into these bracelets kept these coins from being melted down like so many of their brethren. Nobody wants to see my low grade, damaged, ex jewelry Theodosius II so here it is. A privately owned cull can get exposure that a museum basement can not afford its mint state gem rarities.
