Talking about Decadrachms and dream coins..... Sold by Numismatica Ars Clasica for 700,000 CHF: https://www.biddr.com/auctions/nac/browse?a=1787&l=1938932 Exceedingly rare, ten specimens known! Impressive. Needless to say I don't have a decadrachm and surely will never get one
700,000? That's pocket change! I'll take two, thank you... Interestingly, I didn't know lifetime portraits of Alexander even existed.
Hi All, Ptolemaic Dekadrachm. Ptolemy II Philadelphos (285-246 BCE) Egypt, Alexandria, Second Phase of Currency Reform - ca 253/252 - ca 250/49 BCE Ar Dekadrachm Size: 32 mm Weight: 34.35 g OBV: Arsinoe II, wife of Ptolemy II, diademed and veiled head with ram's horn wearing stephane, facing right; lotus scepter behind head. In left field behind head: ΔΔ. Dotted border. REV: Double cornucopiae filled with fruit and bound with fillets. Legend: ΑΡΣIΝΟΗΣ - ΦΙΛΑΔΕΛΦΟΥ. Dotted border. Refs: Lorber: CPE-346; Svoronos-939, pl. xxviii, 5 [6 listed]; SNG Copenhagen-136 var: BB obverse; Sear-7770 var; Troxell (1983), p 44 [3 specs., 2 rev. dies]. Provenance: Ex Amphora (David Hendin) List 87, lot 210 (unsold). - Broucheion
Man, that is pretty cool. I would love to be able to see what the type looked like when it was freshly minted. For anyone curious like me... Here's the ones @ the British Museum: (Clickable to expand) And one other one that I'm not sure who possesses it: (Clickable to expand)
These are part of a series that includes a depiction of an archer, and one of a charioteer. The ANS has several: http://numismatics.org/search/results?q=porus
Ghost on the Throne, by James Romm, pg 265 illustrates the reverse of the British Museum example that @Herodotus posted. Romm calls it a Medallion, and has some discussion on it. States it is the only known depiction of Alexander III fighting Porus with his Elephants from that time.
Hi All, The type is discussed in Frank Holt’s “Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions (Volume 44) (Hellenistic Culture and Society)” available from Amazon. - Broucheion
@Broucheion, you have one of a kind coin in your collection. What a beauty, impressive. Thanks for sharing
COMPARE the above, to Davinci's sketch for a proposed bronze for the DUKE the D'SFORZA or Kandinsky and Marc's BLUE RIDER. The figure of the blue rider (a man atop an arching horse), contrary to Kandinsky's own assertions, may have been borrowed from Leonardo Da Vinci. [(ABOVE)A Rider on a Rearing Horse Trampling on a Fallen Foe. Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452-Cloux, 1519). Metalpoint on blue prepared paper; 151 x 188 mm (5 15/16 x 7 7/16 in.). Lent by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Royal Library, Windsor Castle 12358. (Cat. no. 53)]. This study for a proposed monumental bronze in honor of the Duke D'Sforza's father that was never completed, recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition: "Leonardo Da Vinci, Master Draftsman," would have served perfectly, with its intuitive fluidity of movement and masterful capturing of the essential in the horse and rider figure, as the true herald for the coming world-wide spiritual revival through Art that the Blue Rider movement eschewed. To prevent any backlash from the nationalistic fervor at that time in Germany, Kandinsky and Marc wisely demurred in revealing the true origin of this title. [Germans had their Expressionism; the Italians, their Futurism; and, the French, everything else from Impressionism, Fauvism, to Cubism! Instead of focusing on humanity in general and nurturing the flowering of its spiritual potential through planetary unification and international cooperation, energies were wasted on creating barriers and sabre rattling.] The very symbol and standard for the art movement that he founded in 1911, later vaguely ascribed to the more Teutonic legend of St. George and The Dragon, became a recurring dream motif in Kandinsky's artwork that suggests to me progression, more transcendence and sublimation into a more ethereal and elemental state of being and awareness, again a movement away from the merely representational (material, outer reality) to a more mathematical abstraction in space (spirituality or emotional inner reality). The Ego versus the ID, the path to individuation and self-realization, of the socialization of the individual, becomes a symbol for the universal struggle of mankind, for freedom from the bonds of history and acceptance of its concomitant responsibility to others.
If I may interject a brief digression into the basics of color theory, according to Munsell's "Book of Color and Color Notation," color is composed of three dimensions: Hue, Value and Chroma. Hue is the common name of a color: Red, Blue, Yellow, etc. Value may be viewed as the various degrees of brightness or luminosity on a scale from absolute black ("0") to absolute white ("10"). Tint would indicate lightness; whereas, shade would indicate degree of darkness. Chroma indicates color intensity or strength and is described by using the words weak, moderate or strong. Hue and value and chroma may be visualized as a sphere where the center may be thought of as grey and the north pole as white and the south pole as black; the medium hues would be at the equator of the sphere. Or, visualize a color tree whose trunk grows from darkness to light and whose branches represent the hues from purple to yellow extending out in degrees of chromatic strength. A vocabulary of fourteen words is sufficient to describe all colors: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, hue, black, gray, white, value, weak, moderate, strong, chroma. There are two groups of colors: Chromatic colors (all colors other than neutral colors having hue and chroma) and Achromatic or Neutral colors (white, black and grays, colors which are distinguished by the absence of hue and chroma). Pure color, the amalgam of all the colors in creation, white light = the life force; black (not the paint so named from a tube, but the opposing idea, the concept of vacuum, void), the absence of all sensation of color = death, along with forms, echoing again the interplay of the life wish and the death wish, Eros and Thanatos, like the Ying and the Yang, beginning and ending, passive and dominant themes, the hide and seek of everyday reality and the imagination run throughout Kandinsky's writings and artwork. Forms and lines, released from any "academic" representational format, become very dynamic, super-charged in their relationship to themselves and to one another, to movement, a transcendence from the viscerally felt aggressive, sexual and chaotic towards order, meaning and spirituality, a sublimation into "musicality" (if you will) -one tends to speak of the "harmony" of his forms, "dissonant" forms, "lyrical passages" and finds rhythmic concordance and equivalence in his free-floating color plane -one can also speak of the musicality of his color, in terms of their incongruous, offensive or pleasurable aspect. His colors though do not necessarily serve the figure/ground motif, and, in fact, may be seen as independent; color intensity contributes to the "mood" of his paintings, whether the themes inferred are harrowing or joyous. Kandinsky's works present a very subjective engagement with art, like never before expected of the viewer; a challenge, wherein the intuitive process of peeling away the representational aspect, the uncovering or distillation of quintessential and elemental forms engaged in their own geometric momentum and precision, play, not just in the space of the canvas -where meaning is found in the relationships between forms, between colors, painting that finally banishes figure/ground relationship by use of the schematic allover linear grid, referencing only itself, bringing the viewer into the landscape of unconscious yearnings and desires (interior landscapes, objects of desire) where the arbitrariness of the title of the work is our only guide to interpreting what the painting is about -but in our living space, in our own body. We glide through the mirror of his canvases into a cosmic exhalation and orgasmic wish-fulfillment, wherein the Soul finally becomes one with the Beloved.
