Discorso delle medaglie antiche: Collecting Ancient Coins and Detecting Fakes in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome

Abstract

This article unearths a seventeenth-century manuscript on numismatics from the collections of the Getty Research Institute. This unique copy of Discorso delle medaglie antiche (Discourse on ancient medals), by an unidentified author and of which other nonidentical versions exist, is transcribed and studied here for the first time. Divided into nineteen chapters, the manuscript discusses the main precepts for collecting ancient coins and, above all, explains in detail how to recognize fakes produced by unscrupulous antiquarians. The final part of the manuscript instructs the collector on conserving, cleaning, and cataloging the coins. Various clues in the text suggest that the manuscript was written in a Roman context in the first half of the seventeenth century and lead to the hypothesis that the author is numismatist Francesco Gottifredi: prime expert in recognizing fakes, collector of rare Roman coins, and consultant to the most important collectors of his time.