Beyond the Notion of German Medals: Some Cases of Transnational Patronage

A reassessment of the national cultural boundaries constructed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century medal scholarship implies more than the acknowledgement of the contribution of non-German artists (Giovanni Candida, Adriano Fiorentino, Gian Marco Cavalli, Leone Leoni, Antonio Abondio, Giovanni Pietro de Pomis, François Briot, Claude de la Cloche and Jan de Bommaert) and the circulation of non-German artifacts (for instance, Pisanello’s portraits in Augsburg) to the development of medals in the German-speaking area. First, it must be stressed that patrons and sitters of medals in this area did not all come from German-speaking territories and live permanently within these borders. Second, studies of medals in the sixteenth century today must rethink the traditional ties between place, language and forms of portraiture in a more flexible way. The following contribution reassesses the notion of ›German medals‹ by taking these two considerations into account. This paper aims to demonstrate the extent to which the field of sixteenth-century medals can be an important arena to test the questions raised by the geography of art and cross-cultural studies.