The Hermitage guide - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Борис Иосифович Асварищ (The Department of Numismatics) #8

The Department of Numismatics

The collections of the Numismatic Department are well known throughout the Soviet Union and abroad. They include mint cabinets containing classical, Byzantine, Oriental, Western European, and Russian coins; a cabinet for medals and orders; three repositories of which one contains specimens reflecting the 1500-year history of Western European coinage; a collection of numismatic antiquities; and, finally, a library, the best in the country, totalling more than 200,000 volumes on numismatics, sphragistics, heraldry, and genealogy. In all, the Department houses 1,100,000 items, many of which are on display on the third floor of the Winter Palace.

The exact date of the foundation of the collection is unknown, but it is traditionally considered to be 1771, when the M. Bremsen collection was purchased. Documentary evidence shows that a number of important acquisitions were subsequently made, and these, together with the M. Bremsen collection, formed the nucleus of a Münzkabinett (mint cabinet). As was often the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mint cabinet was attached to the library, and its first keeper A. Luzhkov held the post of librarian.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Hermitage collection totalled over 15,000 coins. The mint cabinet changed places several times and in 1852 its collections were assembled in two rooms on the second floor of the New Hermitage — the present-day Armorial Hall and a corner room with two tiers of windows. The latter room, decorated with medallion-shaped reliefs on the walls, was called the Medal Room and, later, the Coin Room. Special mahogany showcases for coins can still be seen in the Department’s exhibition halls. Coin- and medal-cases were kept on the upper gallery where the numismatists worked. The Department occupied these premises for almost a century, until June 1941.

In 1864 the Münzkabinett was formed into an independent section of coins and medals. At this time the collections totalled about 100,000 examples of numismatic art. By 1917 the number of items had increased to over a quarter of a million. During the Soviet period the numismatic stocks of the Hermitage have grown more than fourfold. From the very beginning entire collections and individual rare coins were acquired for the Münzkabinett both at home and abroad. Suffice it to mention the J. Reichel collection; its 5,000 items of Russian origin were bought by the Hermitage in 1851, and the remaining 40,000 coins and medals mainly of Western European provenance came to the Museum at a later date. The C. Thieme collection, purchased in 1906 in Leipzig, contained 33,000 copper coins, token money and counters, and the collection of the Pskov merchant F. Pliushkin, bought in 1914, comprised 38,000 coins, ingots and several hoards of coins. In 1918 the Hermitage acquired about 2,000 Byzantine coins from the heiress of the well-known collector I. Tolstoy. The Museum was also given very generous donations. Thus, the widow of Academician V. Velyaminov-Zernov presented the Hermitage with 18,000 Oriental coins; in 1917 Academician I. Tolstoy donated his father’s marvellous collection of Russian coins, and in 1928 Academician S. Platonov handed over to the Hermitage a gold medallion of Constantine the Great (A.D. 306—337), found in a trench on the Southwest Front in 1916. Several years ago, a large number of coins, medals and badges were transferred to the Hermitage by Academician B. Bykhovsky.

The Hermitage collection has also profited from various finds. Many ancient coins in the Museum stem not from private collections and the Kunstkammer (Peter the Great’s Cabinet of Curios), but from hoards discovered at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the founding of the Imperial Archaeological Commission in 1859, an increasing number of hoards found their way to the Hermitage. (However, in keeping with the practice prevailing in the nineteenth century, hoards were usually not preserved as complete historical collections; only some rare specimens were selected from them, while the remainder was melted down. At the turn of the century this practice changed, and numismatic finds began to be regarded as documentary evidence. Since the 1920s every hoard has been preserved in its entirety.) In 1898, for example, a hoard was uncovered during the repair of the choir-stalls in the Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra. The earliest of its coins was the unique gold medallion of Constans II (A.D. 337—350), while the latest was minted in 1702. The hoard contained 6,198 gold coins and medals weighing twenty-seven kilograms and forty-three grammes, and 9,890 silver coins with a total weight of 273 kilograms. This hoard has provided the Hermitage with numerous interesting ducats and talers of different origin, including the unique Polish ten-ducat piece of Stephen Báthory, struck in 1580. In addition, the hoard yielded 232 talers with the Russian counter-marks of 1655, known in Russia as yefimki.

In 1934 hunters digging up a badger’s den in a forest on one of the tributaries of the Pasha River near the village of Vikhmiaz, in the Ladoga area, came upon a bronze cauldron full of small silver coins — tenth- and eleventh-century denarii minted in England, France, Italy, Hungary, Czechia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Germany. The hoard was placed in the Hermitage. It was found to contain a great many rare and even hitherto unknown specimens. Thus, a denarius with the name of Florentius could have been struck only by Florentius I, Count of Holland (1049—1061), since the hoard dates from the late eleventh century. The discovery of this coin made it possible to prove that the medieval coinage of Holland had begun over one and a half century before the date generally accepted. A denarius from Hildesheim, dating from the mid-eleventh century and depicting the Church of St Michael, stems from the same hoard. The church was later reconstructed and, prior to the discovery of the Hermitage coin, its earliest appearance was known only from a wooden model of the seventeenth century. Other noteworthy coins in this hoard include the denarii struck in Echternach. When doing his research into the tenth- and eleventh-century coins of the Lower Lorraine and Friesland the German scholar Günther Albrecht made use of the material of most European collections except the Hermitage’s, of which he was apparently oblivious. However, in the Vikhmiaz hoard, the denarii coined by various mints in the Lower Lorraine and Friesland are extremely well represented: taken together, all the hoards mentioned by Albrecht contained almost as many denarii from Thuin, Dinant, Liège, and Remagen as the Vikhmiaz hoard alone.

The Shchumilov hoard of Oriental coins unearthed in 1927 in the Novgorod Region contained a commemorative dirhem of the Abbasid dynasty. One of the acknowledged gems of the Hermitage collection, this dirhem was issued in A.H. 195 (A.D. 810/ 811); the mint is not indicated. The device, rather unusual for a dirhem, features the name of Umdjafar Zubaydah, cousin and wife of the famous Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who was well known for her piety, philanthropy and brilliant poetic gift. Legend has it that she founded several towns and contributed to the construction of water-reservoirs and caravanserais during her pilgrimage to Mecca. Since Umdjafar Zubaydah was born in A.H. 145 (A.D. 762/763), this dirhem, dated AH 195, must have been minted in honour of her fiftieth birthday.

From 1852 onwards, samples of coins and medals struck at the St Petersburg Mint were sent regularly to the Hermitage. A certain portion of the coins, medals and orders now in the Museum was bought from various numismatic firms, such as the Hamburger and Hess Co. in Frankfurt-on-Main, the Kube Co. in Berlin, the Egger Co. in Vienna, the Rollin Co. in Paris, the Spink Co. in London, and the Schulman Co. in Amsterdam. Important accessions came to the Hermitage by way of exchange with the mint cabinets of Berlin, Jena, and Madrid.

After the victory of the October Revolution, during the difficult years of the Civil War and foreign intervention, the young Soviet state showed great concern for the preservation of historic and artistic treasures. Since 1921, by a special decree of the Soviet government all samples of coins, medals, orders, and badges issued by the Moscow and Leningrad Mints have been transferred to the Hermitage.

The unceasing growth of the Hermitage collection in the 1920s and 30s was largely promoted by the official policy of concentrating the more valuable numismatic objects in several major Soviet museums. At this time the Hermitage received a number of former private collections, among them the Stroganov collection totalling 53,000 coins and medals, and the numismatic collections previously housed in the Academy of Arts, the Pavlovsk Palace, Leningrad University, etc. At the beginning of the 1930s, several collections of coins were transferred to the Hermitage from the Academy of Sciences, particularly from its former Asiatic Museum (30,000 items).

The main sections of the Department are as follows: the coinages of Ancient Greece and Rome (where Byzantine coins are also kept); the coinages of the Orient; Russia; Western Europe; and the section of medals, orders and badges.

The collection of classical coins was formed on the basis of numerous private collections. Pride of place is held by coins discovered on the northern and eastern shores of the Black Sea. Among these the gold staters of the fourth century B.C., minted in Panticapaeum (present-day Kerch), are of especially high artistic merit. Their obverse shows a satyr, and the reverse depicts a gryphon standing on a corn-ear. Whereas the gryphon was considered to be the protector of treasures, the corn-ear symbolized wheat, the main wealth of the Bosporan kingdom at the time. Most gold staters came to the Museum in the late nineteenth century from excavation sites near Kerch. Other towns on the northern Black Sea coast, primarily Olbia and Cher-sonesus, yielded a large number of extremely interesting complexes of coins as well.

The Byzantine collection is amply represented by coins of the sixth and seventh centuries, silver miliaresia of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and gold coins including some rare specimens struck by Philippicus Bardanes (711—713).

The Oriental section possesses over 230,000 coins. Compared to the classical section which was augmented by archaeological finds, the collection of Oriental coins, especially Kufic and Juchian ones, largely benefited from the discovery of hoards. Most items of the brilliant Sassanian collection derive from hoards found in the Caucasus. The gold Sassanian coins include a unique double denarius of Hormizd II (303—309). Its obverse shows the profile portrait of the ruler wearing a diadem-like crown topped by a bird of prey. The reverse depicts a fire-altar, shaped as a column with a capital, above which tongues of flame rise. On either side of the altar are two figures, one of which also wears Hormizd’s crown.

Thanks to accessions from the hoards, the Hermitage collection of Kufic, especially Samanid, coins is now one of the best in the world. In addition to the above-mentioned dirhem with the name of Zubaydah, there is another fine dirhem of brilliant workman ship, minted by Daisam ibn Ibrahim al-Qurdi, a statesman who lived in the tenth century and at one time ruled Azerbaijan and Eastern Armenia.

Among the coins of the Mongol dynasties are some 9,000 Juchian specimens. One of the rare coins in this collection was minted by Turakina, widow of Gengis Khan.

The small Georgian collection (1,775 items) includes several rare pieces, such as figured copper coins minted by Georgi IV Lasha, the co-ruler of Queen Tamar and later the ruler of Georgia, and a fish-shaped copper coin dating from 1210, the only known sample of its kind.

The collection of coins of Cilician Armenia is almost of the same size as the Georgian one.

There is an interesting collection of stamps of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, totalling 350 specimens. 340 of these were used in minting gold, silver and copper coins in the Khiva Khanate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Incidentally, they were found by chance below the stage of the Hermitage Theatre in the 1930s.

Prominent among the coinages of the Far East is the group of silver and gold Chinese ingots (about 600 items, 3 in gold), forming one of the best collections in the world. Varying in weight, these jüanpao ingots were widely used in the Chinese trade in modern times; they always bear the date and mint officina, weight, and various wishes of well-being.

Most richly represented in the Numismatic Department are the coinages of Western Europe (over 330,000 items plus coins from America and Australia kept in the same section).

Coins of the barbarian states and of the Carolingians constitute a relatively modest part of the collection. Among 150 gold Merovingian coins are such rare pieces as two tremisses with the name of St Eligius, or Eloi. The gold coinage of the Carolingians, which was generally very scarce, is illustrated by several specimens, notably the gold solidus struck in Dorestad (Holland). This coin was sent to the Memorial Charlemagne Exhibition held in Aachen in 1965.

There are scores of coins dating from the tenth and eleventh centuries, found in the territory of the Soviet Union. The period from the late twelfth to the fifteenth century is not as well represented, for silver coins of the time except Prague groschen and Polish and Baltic coins have not practically occurred in the finds made in Eastern Europe. The number of German bracteates of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, together with coins from the only hoard of bracteates encountered at Khotin, does not exceed 5,000. The Hermitage now has an extensive collection of early gold florins and ducats, particularly from Italy, Hungary and the Rhenish regions of Germany, which were uncovered in the hoards in the south and southwest of the USSR. The gold coinages of the Netherlands, England and France are extremely well represented. There is an exceptionally varied collection of large silver coins of the late fifteenth to eighteenth centuries — talers and testones (from the Italian testa, head, usually bearing a head of the ruler) — and an excellent collection of the first talers struck by the Schlicks, Counts of Czechia. There is also a group of Neapolitan talers of Charles V and Philip II with the countermark of Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland, who inherited these coins from his mother, the Milanese Duchess Bona Sforza. The Neapolitan coins with the counter-mark of 1564 are the immediate predecessors of the Polish taler. Among the silver coins of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries there are many rare trial specimens and kindred piedforts — multiple or pattern pieces struck on an unusually thick flan. Intended for checking the quality and weight of conventional coins, these were often presented as gifts to the high-ranking persons inspecting the mints.

The collection of Russian coins, totalling with duplicates some 250,000, is especially complete, and is the best of its kind in the world. The foundations of Russian coinage were laid by Grand Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich in the late tenth century, and coincided with the beginning of coinage in several European countries, notably Poland, Sweden and Norway (the first coins of these countries are also fairly well represented in the Hermitage). The earliest Russian gold and silver coins are called zlatniki and srebrianiki. Zlalniki are particularly rare; there are only ten known pieces of which seven are in the Hermitage. The srebrianiki of Prince Yaroslav the Wise are distinguished by their superb workmanship. No less remarkable is the zolotoi of Ivan III (1462—1505); although modelled on the Hungarian ducat widely used in commerce at that time, it nevertheless bears Russian legends. By issuing the Russian ducat Ivan III wished to show that Russia had become stronger both politically and economically and acquired increasing international prestige. At the end of 1974 the Museum received, a Russian imitation of an English noble, with the name of Ivan III.

From the fourteenth century until the reforms of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and Peter the Great the main monetary unit in Russia was the denga, coined of tiny bits of silver wire. Some types of the denga, especially those of the appanage period, are quite rare. The coin of the lowest denomination — the copper pulo — was struck in individual areas of the country and much less frequently than the denga. The reforms of the mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries narrowed the gap between the Russian monetary system and that of Western Europe; the mintage of large silver roubles and gold coins was begun. Among the monetary units of the seventeenth century, the talers mentioned above, with the Russian countermark of 1655, are particularly interesting in that they reflect Russia’s economic relations with other European countries. The Hermitage possesses about one third (456 pieces) of the total number of such coins housed in various museums in the world.

One of the unique coins is the so-called Konstantin rouble. Since Tsar Alexander I died leaving no sons or grandsons, his oldest brother, Grand Duke Konstantin, was his logical successor. But Konstantin renounced his rights to the throne and Alexander’s third brother Nicholas became Emperor of Russia. In the meantime, in November — first half of December 1825, the St Petersburg Mint struck seven coins with the name of the heir presumptive, i.e. Konstantin. Two coins found their way to the collection of the famous numismatist J. Reichel, while the remaining five, with three pairs of stamps and trial tin impressions from them, were preserved in the Secret Archives of the Ministry of Finance until 1879. As the Konstantin roubles were minted in the time of the Decembrist Rebellion of 24 December 1825, they quickly became the subject of all sorts of legends, and even fakes appeared. Since then increasingly higher prices have been asked for these roubles. Thus, one of them was recently auctioned for 70,000 francs in Switzerland.

The same section contains a notable collection of Russian silver pay ingots, as well as several interesting hoards.

The section of medals, orders and badges numbers over 60,000 items, including 48,000 Russian and foreign medals. The Hermitage prides itself on the Italian Renaissance medals by Antonio Pisano, Matteo de Pasti, Nicolò Fiorentino, Leone Leoni, and Benvenuto Cellini. There are also about 11,000 works by German medal artists, such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Schwarz and Friedrich Hagenhauer. The following figures may give some idea of the wealth and variety of the collection: it contains 6,000 French medals, 1,200 Netherlandish, over 2,200 Polish, about 1,200 English, 1,000 Swedish and Danish, 800 Austrian, and about 800 works of South and North American origin. The collection of Russian medals is of course especially representative, as that of medals devoted to events of Russian history and issued in Western Europe; there are more than 1,200 gold and platinum medals alone. Among the Russian medals of the eighteenth century (over 2,100 items), the works by Philipp Heinrich Müller, Christian Wermuth, Fiodor Alexeyev, Johann Georg Waechter, Timofei Ivanov, Samuil Yudin, and Johann Balthasar Gass deserve particular attention.

The Numismatic Department also houses numerous Russian, Western European and Oriental seals and signet rings, including Russian pendant seals of the tenth to fifteenth centuries and Russian signet rings of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Of great interest are the designs on the Drohiczyn seals of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. What these seals were intended for remains an open question; some scholars presume they served as trade seals, others believe they were used for sealing up sheaves of pelts, the so-called fur-money.

Since its establishment, in addition to its main function as a repository of art treasures, the Department has been an important research centre of scientific activities in numismatics.

V. Potin