Reply to Thread

Message:: [QUOTE="Curtis, post: 8277729, member: 26430"]And to the things noted by [USER=90248]@Spaniard[/USER] and [USER=112596]@Etcherman[/USER] -- These differences are almost certainly the artifact of photography and, more importantly, the use of plaster casts in the plates. (I.e., it's not a photograph of the coin directly.) Vinchon made casts of every coin and then photographed them for the plates, as was the custom in European catalogs through at least the 1970s. (American firms favored direct photos of coins from the very beginning, in the 19th century.) I've found much wider discrepancies between plates of cast-photos and photographs of actual coins before -- this one (i.e., [USER=110350]@DonnaML[/USER] 's) is comparatively very minor. To demonstrate how far off photographs of casts can be, here are a couple of mine. I'm just putting this in thumbnails, but if you want to enlarge them, you'll see that the three casts (1931, 1933, 1938) ALL look different from one another and the photo:[ATTACH]1461662[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]1461664[/ATTACH][ATTACH]1461665[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]1461666[/ATTACH] This one from BCD Peloponessos that was shown as a cast in Jennifer Warren's die study (“<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/42667375" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/42667375" rel="nofollow">The Autonomous Bronze Coinage of Sicyon (Part 2)</a>,” NC, 1984) is about as close as they come, but still shows differences:[ATTACH]1461671[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]1461670[/ATTACH] I'll just include the full size image for one. This is from the Prowe - Egger III sale (1914) and the CNG EA 493 (2021) photo (after multiple other intervening collections and sales). Again, same coin, but there are differences due to the casting process: [ATTACH=full]1461673[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1461672[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]

Create my FREE Account!

Log in or Sign up

Reply to Thread

Useful Searches