medal

medal
/med"l/, n., v., medaled, medaling or (esp. Brit.) medalled, medalling.
n.
1. a flat piece of metal, often a disk but sometimes a cross, star, or other form, usually bearing an inscription or design, issued to commemorate a person, action, or event, or given as a reward for bravery, merit, or the like: a gold medal for the best swimmer.
2. a similar object bearing a religious image, as of a saint: a Saint Christopher's medal.
v.t.
3. to decorate or honor with a medal.
v.i.
4. to receive a medal, esp. in a sporting event: He medaled in three of four races.
[1580-90; earlier medaille < MF < It medaglia copper coin worth a halfpenny < VL *medalia, var. (by dissimilation) of LL medialia, n. use of neut. pl. (taken as fem. sing.) of medialis MEDIAL]

* * *

Piece of metal struck with a design to commemorate a person, place, or event.

Medals can be of various sizes and shapes, ranging from large medallions to small plaques, or plaquettes. Most medals are made of gold, silver, bronze, or lead, the precious metals being used for the finer productions. The art of the medalist began in the mid-15th century with bronze medals of Italian Renaissance rulers and humanists. Some of the most beautiful were made by Benvenuto Cellini.

Henry IV and Marie de Medicis portrayed on the obverse side of a bronze-gilt medal by Guillaume ...

Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Samuel H. Kress Collection

* * *

Introduction

      piece of metal struck with a design to commemorate a person, place, or event. Medals can be of various sizes and shapes, ranging from large medallions to small plaques, or plaquettes. Most medals are made of gold, silver, bronze, or lead, the precious metals being used for the finer productions. Medals are produced by a variety of techniques: they are cast from a model of wax, wood, or sometimes stone; they are struck from a die engraved in intaglio, the design impressed on the metal by pressure; or they can be produced by the repoussé process, in which two separately worked, interlocking molds containing the blank are brought together under pressure. A postitive punch, or hub, can be cut in hard metal and the design stamped into a softer metal, which is then hardened to form a die (thus many dies can be made from one hub). Machine cutters, introduced in the 19th century, copied mechanically an enlarged electrotype of the original design; but this technique, by eliminating hand cutting, took away much of the medalist's work.

      It is generally accepted that the modern commemorative medal, in both form and content, was invented by the Italian painter Antonio Pisano (Pisanello, Il) (c. 1395–1455), called Pisanello. His first medal portrayed the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus and was made in 1438–39. His medals provided a portable portrait relief of the sitters, reproducible by casting in lead or bronze and small enough to be held in the hand. He placed a profile portrait on the obverse and an allegorical or pictorial scene on the reverse. This formula for the medal has lasted to the present day. Pisanello made medals of 16 sitters for the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, Naples, and Rimini. Major schools of medal making developed, particularly in Mantua, Florence, the Veneto, and Rome. The papal court had no local school but attracted medalists from all over Italy. Toward the end of the century the portrait effigy became bolder and more sculptural in the work of Niccolò Fiorentino and Sperandio of Mantua.

      During the 16th century in Italy the cast medal continued in favour, and Leone Leoni (Leoni, Leone) (1509–90) of Milan and Pier Paolo Galeotti were its principal masters. Leoni was engraver at the papal mint in Rome from 1537 to 1540, Master of the Habsburg mint at Milan (1542–45, 1550–59), and court sculptor to Charles V. His most masterly cast medal is of Michelangelo (1561). He also produced struck portrait medals, like those of the Genoese statesman and admiral Andrea Doria. For the first time the struck medal became a common instrument of court propaganda, especially for the popes and for the ruling Medici family in Florence. Galeotti made more than 80 cast portrait medals, which rival the work of Leoni. Pastorino da Siena produced a long series of portraits of sitters of lesser rank, cast in lead without reverse type. The finest struck portraits were the work of the medalists Domenico di Polo and Domenico Poggini in Florence and Giovanni Bernardi, Alessandro Cesati, and Benvenuto Cellini at the papal court. Antonio Abondio drew his style from Leoni and from the charming Mannerist portrait medalists of Reggio nell'Emilia, particularly Alfonso Ruspagiari.

      The earliest French medals were heraldic pieces struck in gold and silver, c. 1455, to commemorate the expulsion of the English. The first portrait medal was a struck gold presentation piece of Charles VIII and Anne of Britanny, made by local goldsmiths for a visit to Lyon in 1494. Italian medalists had worked in France and directly inspired the work of Jacques Gauvain and Jérôme Henry at Lyon. In 1550 mint officials were sent by Henry II to seek out and obtain German minting machinery, and in consequence numerous propaganda medals were produced, ascribed to the Huguenot goldsmith Étienne Delaune and to Claude de Héry. With the appointment in 1572 of the great Mannerist sculptor Germain Pilon (Pilon, Germain) (1535–90) by Charles IX to the new office of “contrôleur général des effigies,” a new form of medal appeared. Pilon produced a superb series of large cast portrait plaques for members of the Valois dynasty and a series of struck medals for Henry III. For Henry IV the Danfrie family produced a series of struck medals. Jean Warin (1604–72) also made elegant cast pieces, and between 1636 and 1670 he held almost a monopoly of the production of struck pieces for the court. Guillaume Dupré (1574–1647) followed Pilon, charmed Henry IV with his portrait medals, and was appointed in 1604 “conducteur et contrôleur général” of the Paris Mint. Nicolas Briot (1579–1646), rival of Dupré, was a lesser master who was a skilled mechanic and engraver general at the Paris Mint from 1600. In 1625 he went to London, where he revived the English court's interest in the medal.

Germany and Austria
      The free imperial cities under the Holy Roman Empire were important centres of patronage, and the sitters were proud burghers depicted in a realistic idiom. A few fine medals are ascribed to Albrecht Dürer, but the first professional medalist was Hans Schwarz of Augsburg, active in Germany and elsewhere between 1512 and 1532. Christoph Weiditz produced numerous Augsburg medals and with Schwarz showed the greatest sensitivity in capturing individual character in his portraits. Friedrich Hagenauer, active in Munich and in Augsburg (1527–32), produced more than 230 medals. In Nürnberg, Matthes Gebel (active 1525–54) and his follower Joachim Deschler (active 1540–69) were the principal medalists. Ludwig Neufahrer worked mainly in Nürnberg and the Austrian Habsburg domains, employed by Ferdinand I from 1545. The Italian expatriate medalist Abondio was called to Vienna and also appointed court medalist by Emperor Maximilian II in Prague in 1566.

The Netherlands (Netherlands, The)
      The famous medal of Erasmus of 1519, by Quentin Massys (Massys, Quentin), made in Antwerp, is the grandest northern Renaissance medal, but it had no progeny. Of the regular professional medalists some, like Steven van Herwyck (c. 1530–67) and Jacob Jonghelinck (1530–1606), who worked in Italy for Leoni, adopted the Italian style, somewhat more idealized than the German. The war with Spain (1568–1648) stimulated the production of propaganda medals, which became a popular vehicle of nationalist sentiment. The Netherlands' tradition of silversmithing was also adapted to the medal. Highly skilled engraved portraits on thin plates of gold and silver were made. The masterpiece of this genre is a portrait of Elizabeth I of England's favourite, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, in 1586, engraved on gold by the Dutch Mannerist engraver and painter Hendrik Goltzius (Goltzius, Hendrik) (1558–1617). Simon van de Passe produced similar work and went to London, where he created a series of Tudor and Stuart portraits.

The Baroque (Baroque period) period
      The large struck propaganda medal was issued widely in northern Europe in the 17th century. The Thirty Years' War and later the Dutch wars with France and England stimulated such issues. Sebastian Dadler (1586–1657) was employed by the courts of Saxony, Sweden, Poland, and the Holy Roman Empire to produce large struck medals on the political events of the time. The Swiss Johann Carl Hedlinger (1691–1771) was trained in Paris, became court medalist in Stockholm, and produced numerous historical medals on commission. His portraits are the most elegant and individualistic effigies of the 18th century. The European medal was dominated by the court style of Versailles. The grand propaganda series of the Histoire métallique, a series of medals struck to commemorate Louis XIV's reign, was envied and imitated throughout Europe, though the Dutch copied it in a manner calculated to ridicule the French. The technical excellence of the Paris Mint was also imitated. The first fully Baroque medal in England, on the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, was made by the Paris-trained medalist John Roettier, in the full French court style.

      Caspar Gottlieb Lauffer of Nürnberg from 1679 issued a large number of medals engraved by numerous artists and commemorating contemporary events. He eventually published a catalog, in 1742, entitled Das Laufferische Medaillen-Cabinet.

      The cast medal continued to be made. In Italy, the Tuscan sculptor, scholar, courtier, and mint master Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi (1656–1740) revived the cast portrait medal in 1677 and founded a school with his pupils Antonio Selvi (1679–1753) and Lorenzo Maria Weber (1697–1774). The school lasted until the 1740s. In Rome, the few cast medals included works by Charles-Jean-François Chéron (1635–98) and by Gioacchino Francesco Travani (active 1634–75), after designs by the great Italian sculptor of the Baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The Dutch silversmiths invented chased medals made of shells of silver hammered into relief from the reverse (repoussé) and soldered to a rim, the work by Pieter van Abeele (1608–84) being particularly charming.

      In England (United Kingdom), Thomas and Abraham Simon produced cast portrait medals of great refinement in a northern European realistic tradition. The cast portrait plaque was revived by the Romantic sculptor Pierre-Jean David d'Angers (1789–1856) in his series of portraits forming a Galérie des contemporaines, begun in 1827. The Paris school of the late 18th century, especially the work of Benjamin Duvivier (1728–1819) for King Louis XVI, combined Rococo elegance with realism. Duvivier's work included commissions from the U.S. Congress. The Napoleonic regime ordered an elaborate Histoire métallique. The Duvivier era saw the introduction of steam-powered presses for coin and medal making, perfected by the English engineer Matthew Boulton at Birmingham in 1786, and the use of the reducing machine (pantograph), which permitted the translation of a sculptor's large-scale relief model into a working die (see below Techniques of production (coin)). This invention was crucial to the development of a new Parisian school of the Art Nouveau, founded by Jules-Clément Chaplain (1839–1909) and Louis Oscar Roty (1846–1911).

      A rival and similar school developed in Vienna and spread in Hungary and Bohemia. Britain was touched by the missionary zeal for the Art Nouveau style shown by Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), and a few sculptors, most importantly Alfred Gilbert (1854–1934), took up medal making. Frank Bowcher (1864–1938) studied under Legros in Paris, where he produced both struck and cast medals. He became engraver at the Royal Mint, London. In the United States, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) produced admirable medals and portrait plaques in the same Art Nouveau style.

      The German reaction to the power of the Parisian school produced a school of expressionist medalists, while in France the 1920s saw the beginning of the Art Deco medal. After World War II the artistic medal continued to show remarkable possibilities as a medium for portraiture. Wit, imagination, and experiments with form brought the medal to resemble the plaquette or ornamental tablet. The variety and originality can be seen through the biennial exhibitions of the Fédération Internationale de la Médaille.

John Graham Pollard

Additional Reading
General works on medals and medallic art include Jean Babelon, La Médaille et les médailleurs (1927); Max Bernhart, Medaillen und Plaketten, 3rd ed., edited by Tyll Kroha (1966); Sir George Hill, Medals of the Renaissance, rev. ed., edited by Graham Pollard (1978); Mark Jones, The Art of the Medal (1979); Graham Pollard and Giuseppe Mauri Mori, Medaglie e monete (1981); and L. Forrer (comp.), Biographical Dictionary of Medallists: Coin, Gem, and Seal-Engravers, Mint-Masters, &c., Ancient and Modern, 8 vol. (1902–30, reprinted 1970). For current sources of information, see Monete e Medaglie (bimonthly, Italy); and Muenzen und Medaillen-Monnaies et Medailles (monthly, Switzerland).

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужно решить контрольную?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • medal — {{/stl 13}}{{stl 8}}rz. mnż III, D. u; lm D. i {{/stl 8}}{{stl 7}} mały, płaski krążek metalowy, okrągły lub owalny, ozdobiony napisem, wizerunkiem itp. po jednej albo obu stronach, upamiętniający ważne wydarzenia, czyny bohaterskie, odkrycia… …   Langenscheidt Polski wyjaśnień

  • Medal — Med al, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Medaled}, or {Medalled}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Medaling} or {Medalling}.] To honor or reward with a medal. Medaled by the king. Thackeray. [1913 Webster] …   The Collaborative International Dictionary of English

  • medal — [med′ l] n. [Fr médaille < It medaglia < VL * medalia, a small coin < * medialia < LL medialis, MEDIAL] 1. a small, flat piece of metal with a design or inscription stamped or inscribed on it, made to commemorate some event, or… …   English World dictionary

  • Medal — Med al, n. [F. m[ e]daille, It. medaglia, fr. L. metallum metal, through (assumed) LL. metalleus made of metal. See {Metal}, and cf. {Mail} a piece of money.] A piece of metal in the form of a coin, struck with a device, and intended to preserve… …   The Collaborative International Dictionary of English

  • medal — index prize Burton s Legal Thesaurus. William C. Burton. 2006 …   Law dictionary

  • medal — has derivative forms medalled, medallist in BrE, and usually medaled, medalist in AmE …   Modern English usage

  • medal — [n] decoration of honor badge, commemoration, gold, hardware*, laurel, medallion, reward, ribbon, wreath; concepts 337,476 …   New thesaurus

  • medal — ► NOUN ▪ a metal disc with an inscription or design, awarded for achievement or to commemorate an event. ORIGIN Latin medalia half a denarius …   English terms dictionary

  • Medal — For the English rock band, see Medal (band). Medallion redirects here. For other uses, see Medallion (disambiguation). Medal distributed by Cecilia Gonzaga to political allies, a common practice in Renaissance Europe. Designed by Pisanello in… …   Wikipedia

  • medal — n. 1) to award, give a medal 2) to earn a medal 3) to strike ( make ) a medal 4) a bronze; gold; silver medal (as a prize) 5) a medal for (to earn a medal for bravery) * * * [medl] give a medal gold silver medal (as a prize) …   Combinatory dictionary

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”