A Museum That Values its Ancient Coin Collection

Hello coin friends! I've been meaning to share a few pictures and thoughts with you all for a while pertaining to the Archeological Museum of Split and its fantastic collection of ancient coins! The thing that struck me about this Museum when I visited it is how much of the exhibit was devoted to showcasing the coins. I am sure that there are other museums with collections that are more extensive but in terms of the percentage of coins to other artifacts I've never seen an Archeological museum with such an emphasis on ancient numismatics.

Our tour guide when we were visiting Salona told us that the majority of the collection was discovered in the ruins of Salona. I assume, considering the variety and the completeness of the collection, that the museum also purposefully acquired many of the specimens.

Ruins of Salona

When you enter the museum you come into a courtyard that is filled with sculptures, mosaics and and other physical remains that were uncovered from Salona (which was the Roman provincial capital).

As a ancient coin collector I tend to equate the steady decrease in artistry on coin portraits during the third century with a general decline in high art across all mediums. However, a quick look around the courtyard of the museum shows that artists of the late 3rd century were still producing impressively artistic objects like the above sarcophagus that was excavated at Salona.

Moving through the courtyard you come into the central space of the museum. It's here that you get your first glimps of all the numismatic eye candy!

There are two separate wings to the left and right that deal with the pre-historic and modern periods of Split respectively. The larger central space (pictured above) takes you in a linear progression of the region's history from Greek to Byzantine as you move from left to right around the museum. The tall cases that you see house the majority of the coins on display with artifacts and the rest of the coins sandwiched between them that relate to each time period.


A selection of Greek coins on display

Even though you can't see both sides of the coin with this display method the museum has multiples of several of the coin types that they place side by side. Some coins that the museum has only one example of show the obverse and others the reverse which makes me curious what the factors were that led to the decision of which side to show??


Roman Republican Coins




A select few coins of Trajan, Otho and hometown favorite Diocletian!

There were a lot more interesting coins and types I wanted to look through and photograph (I could have spent all day in there) but I thought perhaps it would be best not to overtax my girlfriend's patience (she is great and tries to take an interest in my hobby ) Overall I was impressed by how much attention was given to the coins. In some cases a few of the coins were shown separately from the other coins with a write up on how that type fit in with the history of the region.

So what do you all think? Have any of you been to a museum and been pleasantly surprised at how the museum handled the ancient coin display?

 

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Nice pics and thanks for sharing.

Getty Villa has a small room just for coins & some random ones thrown around in various exhibits.

 

Love it!

 

Thanks for sharing. I've heard great things about the museum in Split from several collectors. It's definitely on the list to check out if I ever plan a trip to the area. My favorite museum I've actually visited with respect to their coin collection is the ANA Money Museum in Colorado Springs. My wife and I went there a couple years ago for my birthday and both really enjoyed it along with the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center next door which didn't have any coins, but plenty of other interesting pieces.

A close second to the ANA museum has been the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. They have various permanent exhibits that have a few coins but two of their traveling exhibits have had great coin displays. The most recent one was a Vikings exhibit that had an array of medieval coins and multiple entire hoards on display. A few years ago they had a "Mythological Creatures" exhibit which as you might imagine had various Greek and Roman coins with griffins, pegasi, medusae and other creatures with excellent displays and descriptions. It seemed like people really enjoyed them as it was one of the few times I've been in a museum and actually had to stand in line to look at a coin.

 

Thank you for that excellent post @Curtisimo, I envy your visit. That is indeed a very well done numismatic display - unusual for that kind of setting in my experience.

A number of years ago I approached the Curator of Towneley Museum at the town where I was born and grew up in northern Britain, with an offer to donate my collection of Roman Britain associated coins as it then existed if they would guarantee to keep them on public display in one of the rooms. The curator was very gracious and appreciative, but she explained that the rules for display prohibited her from making such a guarantee - in fact, she explained there could be no guarantee that my coins would even be kept together as a display. I withdrew my offer. Evidently that is a not uncommon practice in the museum world.

 

Thank you!!

 

Last month me and my wife went on a holiday to Mallorca Spain, visited some museums, Judge for yourself

Manacor:



Montiuri:



Soller:



tintinabula = some kind of coinshaped bells

We visted a very nice glass museum full of Roman Greek Egyptian Phoenician
glasswork, but thats off topic overhere I think.

 

Most museums don't want donations that are not accompanied by a cash donation that will fund the building and maintenance of the display as well as the staff member to curate them in perpetuity. They would be happy to get the coins and sell them to fund their exhibit of TV memorabilia but cataloging and security for your coins would make them a liability for a museum where each square inch is expected to produce heavy traffic of visitors. Who wants to see junky old coins?

I like the idea of showing two like coins together a long as the coins are correctly selected to be 'like'. The other answer is to produce painted plaster casts of the other side. It is quite an 'art' form. I attended a 1987 travelling exhibit of Roman 'coins' associated with Germany when it visited the Smithsonian. There was not a real coin in the show. All were plaster. However well they were done, I felt gypped.

I bought (and still have) the catalog of the exhibit authored by a guy who had been graduated from the same college as I but a year ahead of me and somehow had escaped the draft. I, for the first time, was glad the Army had saved me from a life in museums for which I had hoped.

 

Beautifull posts! I love that Aureus to the right of the Trajan one

 

Yes, that was a good learning experience. Your observations and comments are “spot on”. I ran up against the same thing when I thought of donating some of my Arizona associated antique firearms and accoutrements to our state museum. I was advised by a friend who has a lot of experience with the way of museums that they would not hesitate to sell, or barter, my donations if it was to their advantage.

 

Wow @Curtisimo. The view of those ruins is breathtaking! So exciting to see those treasures.

I have never been to a museum to specifically see coins; but, I am sure I must have seem some. I am happy enough to trail along on your expeditions. I would love to go on a dig.

Also, thank you, too @Andres2

 

Wow, those coin displays are nice! Thanks for the pics. I'd like to visit Split someday. Anything left of Diocletian's famous cabbage patches?

 

That's awesome, thanks for sharing those @Curtisimo

I've never seen an ancient coin in a public display, except for the one I set up myself at the school I teach at!

The most ancient coins I have ever seen at one place, other than my house, was at @Bing 's house! Plus, I got a sandwich and he let me touch the coins....totally better than a museum!

 

And that, my friend was a good day!!!!!!

 

Sounds like you and your girlfriend had a fantastic holiday/adventure visiting these eastern mediterranean ancient sights. Great to see the different ways in which ancient artifacts and coins are displayed, I have visited quite a few and have seen some varied methods of displaying coins the two biggest (most coins per square inch) were in Rome, I got a shot of one of the coin rooms in the Capitoline museum below. But probably more interesting was the British Museum effort in mixing coins with similar themed artifacts. Top photo coin room Capitoline Museum Rome. Next three various shots in the Roman/Greek ancient artifacts and coin section British Museum.

 

Great posts everyone!

Thank you Jamesicus. It was a fascinating trip almost everywhere we went.

That is a bummer that the museum wouldn't agree to display your collection. You would think that a local museum would jump at the chance to inherit a focused collection that has already been attributed and described at length on your website (they could even link to it on thier own website). All the work is already done for them. I think a large collection of coins is far more impressive than one or two additional artifacts or antique pictures or wax busts of whatever the British equivalent of a Kardashian is!

I have thought about donating my collection to my alma mater some day if none of my neices / nephews / future children take an interest in coins and history. I give one coin a year to all my nieces and nephews for Christmas just to see if it sticks. So far no go I'm going to try ancients this year.

Nice @Andres2. I've never been to Spain but it is high on the list. The museum with the windmill looks cool even from the outside thank you for sharing.

Wow AA! That is awesome. I didn't get a chance to spend much time in the capitoline museum the last time I was there but I will be going back in April and I'm going to make sure I block out enough time. The British museum pictures are awesome as well. Probably the greatest ancient coin collection in the world! I always enjoy seeing photos of all the cool places you have been. Thank you for sharing!

 

Very cool!
My local museum has a small natural history section and larger native american exhibit as well as an art gallery. It'd be nice to see a world history exhibit, but they lack the space, and funding I'm sure.

 

What a beautiful collection and great photos. Thank you. It is good to see someone trying to do things right in regard to numismatics.

It saddens me, however, to see that many museums have minimized numismatics in their collections.

The Getty Villa near Los Angeles, for example, is a beautiful recreation of a first-century Roman country house, the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, Italy.

http://www.getty.edu/visit/villa/

Its feeble numismatics exhibit, however, is embarrassing. It consisted of just a few display cases with no social or historical context.





Many of the folks on this subforum have far better coin collections than what I saw at the Getty. (And remember, the Getty foundation has far more money than most museums and certainly more than any of us to spend on some nice pieces.) The small coin collection and its display was amateurish, at best.

The Getty's statues, architecture, and art work was breathtaking, however.

This stone monument below from the Getty Villa touched me deeply and reminds me of why I love ancient history.



This is how most coin collections at museums are preserved and enjoyed, tucked away in some dark recess of a forgotten storage room:

 

I would also be disappointed if I went to an ancient coin exhibition and there were no authentic coins in the whole show. That's like going to dinner and getting served plastic replica food!

Another interesting method I've seen to display coins that works well, especially with small coins, is to have a blown up photo of obverse and reverse next to the coin like in the Ophel Archeological Museum in Jerusalem.

The drawback is that it takes up a lot of space so a museum would never be willing to do this with a larger collection.

I've also seen coins displayed standing upright in a glass case which takes up even more space but looks nice.

These were at an exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.

I tend to like the idea of sandwiching the coins between pieces of glass but I've never actually seen this done.

 

In all fairness I need to clarify: the collection I was offering consisted of a selection of the following Roman Britain associated coins from my collection (not the ones I feature on my latest Britannic Coinage of the Tetrarchy web page): there were some Julio-Claudian bronzes (mostly Claudius, Hadrian and Commodus); some Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Geta “victory over Britannia” denarii; Carausius & Allectus antoniniani and some Tetrarchic London Mint folles. So I didn’t have a web page that featured those coins to link to (although I would have written one if they would have asked). As I mentioned, the Curator was interested and appreciative, but she could not give me any assurance that the collection I was offering would be kept on display (accompanied by my name as the donor) or even kept intact. It seems you have to be a collector or numismatist of considerable stature (which I am not) to be able to specify display options (understandable). In his contribution to this thread Doug Smith explained very well what seems to be the prevailing rationale adopted by museums in general toward donations by amateur collectors.