It is a medieval penny (denier) from the County of Blois in modern France. I do not own the coin. I found the image while buying coins from medieval Champagne for an article I was writing about the Great Fairs. I recognized the style immediately. If you look at ancient Celtic coins, you will see what numismatists have called "degraded" styles or "abstract" styles. Some coin folk today call them "Picasso-like." About 15 years ago, Geraldine Chimirri-Russell was given duties for the coin cabinet in addition to other work at the University of Calgary Nickle Arts Museum. Not a numismatist, she was just looking over her inventory and turned one of those ancient Celts obliquely and three-dimensional image jumped out at her. About five years of patient research finally brought her to start publishing and speaking at conferences. She has found similar examples across other cultures. I was startled to see that the ancient Celtic tradition had continued at least in one place in medieval France. The gap is a thousand years. We learn to see images (especially coins) front-on. This was a Renaissance invention and like movable type, it came to dominate our culture. We no longer view obliquely. On these ancient coins Chimirri-Russell has found many human faces, but also several monsters or other scenes so disturbing that she refuses to discuss them. Not all "abstract" Celtic coins reveal these images - or perhaps we have not found the proper orientation and view. Original paper by Geraldine Chimirri-Russell archived at Metamedia Stanford online here. (Scroll all the way down to the bottom to see images of rotated coins.) My overview of Geraldine Chimirri-Russell's work on FORVM here. My comments in Ancients.Info here. (Links to the Fitzwilliam Museum newsletter and the Congress in Madrid announcement are no longer active.)
