What's the Renaissance to You?
Steve: Beyoncé named her summer 2022 album “Renaissance” and explained the title to her fans, sharing, “It’s a new birth. I hope you feel liberated, but the renaissance is not over.” The word Renaissance is French, with Latin origins in the verb “renascere” meaning “to be born again” and the term is also related to rebirth and renewal.
Ben Zimmer wrote in the December 2-3, 2023, weekend edition of the Wall St. Journal that the term’s current usage only emerged in the first part of the 19th century, referencing the flowering of the arts in the 14th to 16th centuries that served to transition from the medieval to the modern era. He observed that historians typically peg the birth of the Renaissance to Florence, Italy under Medici patronage.
Burdette’s trilogy remains a go-to reference for me, and the Italian Renaissance is an area of personal interest as well. Several years ago I took a class at the American Numismatic Association’s Summer Seminar taught by David T. Alexander and Dr. David Menchell on medals where we were able to handle and view 15th and 16th century medals of the Italian Renaissance. It inspired me to learn more about medals and to add some to my collection. Understanding how medals relate to art and history has helped me in my writing for Coin World.
Image: Steve has long appreciated Italian Renaissance medals, such as this Italian bronze medal from the late 15th century for Girolamo Savonarola by medalist Niccolò Fiorentino in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum shares, “Born into a family of Florentine goldsmiths, Niccolò ranks among the leading portrait medalists of the Italian Renaissance. Working in high relief, he created effigies that are bolder in scale, more varied, and more bluntly realistic than anything produced earlier.”
Dennis, two questions: 1) isn’t Beyoncé wonderful and 2) what’s your connection to the word Renaissance?
Dennis: Anyone who sells 200 million of anything is amazing. Beyoncé has sold more than that many records. She’s a national treasure! And her Renaissance album is just part one of a three-part production. By the time this “Collecting Friends” blog is published, part two will be out in the world and continuing her record-setting streak. Viva Queen Bey.
When it comes to numismatic renaissances: like you, I immediately think of Roger W. Burdette and his book trilogy. He wrote about the first rebirth of U.S. coinage, the artistic garden planted by Theodore Roosevelt and Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the early 1900s.
To my mind, a second renaissance started about a hundred years later, in 1999, with the State quarters program.
There had been other, smaller innovations in American numismatics in the 1970s and ’80s: the Bicentennial coins of 1976, the American Arts gold medallions of the early 1980s, the return of commemoratives in 1982, the American Eagle bullion coins of 1986. The State quarter program was much bigger than any of those.
By 1999 the Bicentennial was nearly twenty-five years in the past. Most of the nation’s circulating coins had been stuck in the same basic designs since the 1930s and ’40s. The State quarters were like the hot summer sun rising on a frozen landscape, melting ice that had encased American coin design for decades.
Not all of the 1999 to 2008 State quarters showcased mind-blowing creative work. But as a concept the program itself was an exciting renaissance. Circulating U.S. coins could be innovative again. They could be little canvases to highlight new designs by artists from around the country.
Now, in the 2020s, I believe we’re in the midst of a third renaissance of American numismatics. In my opinion this started around 2009 as an extension of the 1999 renaissance, but since then it’s taken on a life of its own. Congress and the Mint expanded the State quarter program in 2009 to include the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories, and then launched a new “America the Beautiful” quarters program from 2010 to 2021. The Mint started experimenting with high-relief gold coins in 2009, and new silver medal programs in 2015. The platinum bullion coin program started off strong in 1997 and since the 2000s has emerged as a showcase for exemplary allegorical design.
Part of today’s renaissance is legislative. The Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 has made national headlines with the exciting American Women quarters. This is just the tip of that spear, the first of several creative programs that will bring new coins to our pocket change through 2030 and beyond.
Another important part of today’s renaissance is in people and processes. The Mint has a gangbuster creative and project-management team in the Office of Design Management. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee have hit their stride in recent years, providing advice and counsel to the Treasury Department. The Artistic Infusion Program is doing exactly what it was created for in 2003: bringing fresh new talent into the field of American coin design, with diverse backgrounds and insights. And the Mint since 2019 has had an inspiring artist and team leader, Joseph Menna, in the office of chief engraver.
Steve, I’ll be honest with you: I dance like a numismatist and I can’t sing or compose music. Beyoncé’s Renaissance is way out of my league—but I do know it’s a great time to be a coin collector!
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Hello! And welcome to the ANA’s blog series, “Collecting Friends.”
We decided to approach this much like a conversation between friends. One of us starts with a topic, then the other responds. Simple as that. Along those lines, we’ll keep the tone conversational as much as possible.
We both write about coins professionally, and will keep our relative style guides in our writing. For Dennis, Publisher at Whitman Publishing, that means capitalizing “Proof” and italicizing Red Book and never saying anything bad about Ken Bressett, who’s awesome anyway.
For Steve, who’s written with Coin World for 15 years, it means Winged Liberty Head dime instead of “Mercury” dime, and similar nuances and oddities. And, it means writing A Guide Book of United States Coins (better known as the “Red Book”).
Both of us started collecting when we were little, introduced to coins by a chance encounter with an old coin that sparked our curiosity. One of Steve’s interests is coin valuation, and he gravitates towards the intersection of art and coins. Dennis enjoys medals and world coins, and studying modern U.S. coins in the context of older series, what came before.
We met in 2012 at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the Austrian Mint where there was both a Ben Franklin and a Betsy Ross impersonator. We’ve become great friends in the past decade. We even were appointed together to sit on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee starting in 2016, but Steve resigned soon after he was appointed to accept a full-time job at the Treasury Department while Dennis was re-appointed in 2020.
We taught a course together on numismatic publishing and writing a few years ago at the Summer Seminar, and while life has gotten in the way of us teaching another class, we jumped at our friend Caleb’s suggestion that we write a column. We hope you enjoy it!
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