Were 19th century American coins inspired by ancient coins?

I was just browsing through my collections and by chance I happened to look at a Liberty Seated Dollar (not the one in the picture. I just used that one because it has more details) right after I looked at my Marcus Aurelius denarius and I noticed they have a lot in common.




Were 19th century US coins inspired by ancient coins of Rome & Greece?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

I'm sure the designers and engravers of our national coinage had some kind of training that would have exposed them to classical art in the form of sculpture, painting, carving and engraving, that would have left an impression, even a subliminal one, on those artists, which of course, would have been expressed in the production of their ideas and subsequent work.

"Were 19th century US coins inspired by ancient coins of Rome & Greece?"

Who could say definitively, except those designers and engravers themselves?

 

Interesting question. And one that I have asked myself over the decades of collecting coins. I would say yes. There seems to be a lot of examples of designs inspired by ancient coins. One example is the Winged Liberty Head Dime. They call it the Mercury Dime. Why? Liberty looks like the Roman God Mercury. I'm sure there are Roman coins depicting Mercury.
I'm interested in the responses such as the one @Hookman just shared with you.

 

The short answer is indirectly.

Christian Gobrecht created an American version of the seated Britannia.





Who took their cue from the Romans. This Julia Paula denarius is one of many examples.

 

Of course. Mike Markowitz has written about this subject.
There are 3 museum exhibits in this very subject, that I have visited, one a t a University. I would give odds there are quite a few more.

Art coinage is timeless. As one collector pointed out, when I talked about the kind of coin art the ancients used and the similarity to our coin art, he said: "I give you animals. I give you the symbols of Rome. Where they roamed, so did the art".

I always liked that answer.

 

Exactly!!

I will take part of your answer and turn it around.

Coinage Art is Timeless !

Of course it is.
Man has always taken his cues from Nature, Religion, and other Men(and Women).

Original Man put paintings of animals on the walls of caves.
Later Man put engravings of animals on coins.

When I thought about the on-going and never-ending connections between Man and the Natural World, it made me think of this :

watch