Perspectives On The Renaissance Medal PDF Download

Excerpt from Medals of the Renaissance In the autumn of 1915, at the invitation of the Council of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, I had the honour of delivering in Edinburgh the Rhind Lectures, of which this book is the outcome. In preparing it for the press, the matter of the lectures has been revised, partly re-arranged, and occasionally re-written with large additions, while footnotes have been supplied throughout with the object of making the book of some use as a work of reference. There are many volumes on separate portions of the subject, but none, I believe, that can be regarded as an attempt to give a general summary of the whole. Illustrations have been a serious difficulty. In delivering the lectures, every medal that was mentioned was also illustrated. Was the same plan to be followed in the printed book? That would have meant either an unusually lavish amount of illustration or else the cutting out of a great number of links in the argument. I have preferred to leave many of the pieces unillustrated, in the hope that those who take a real interest in the subject will refer to the illustrations which are to be found elsewhere, and to which references are supplied. The arrangement of the medals on the plates will, I fear, prove irksome. Thus, medals by the same artist are illustrated on different plates, and not in the order in which they are mentioned in the text, an inconvenience which is due to the fact that some of the plates are from borrowed negatives, while others are newly photographed. Again, the scale on which the reproductions are made has inevitably varied with the size of the original. Reproduction is now so costly that it was absolutely necessary to borrow negatives and, further, to reduce the scale of reproduction of many pieces; the result is a distribution of the medals which is anything but scientific. Two works on Italian medals which are seldom mentioned in the footnotes - simply because the only alternative would have been to mention them on every page - are Alfred Armand's Médailleurs de la Renaissance, which, with all its faults, remains and will long remain the standard book on the subject, and Cornelius von Fabriczy's clever though rather ill-proportioned sketch, which I have cited by Mrs. Hamilton's translation, entitled Italian Medals. Any references given in my notes for details about an Italian medallist should be supplemented by reference to these books, which are fully indexed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.