Drei vervielfältigte Metallobjekte, ihre Repliken und eine Glocke: Gattungssprünge, materielle und mediale Transformationen

Matrices, models and moulds made to produce portable reliquaries in gold, appliques in silver, and book binding decorations in metal or leather were sometimes reused to realize “medals” at a later time. This paper focuses on small reliefs that became uncommon medals through a process of material and conceptual transformation that concerned their genre, format, medium, use and reception (including the criteria according to which the images and the quality of these “medals” were evaluated). While the change of destination of these inventions has sometimes been recognized, its implications in terms of mediality still deserve to be investigated. Additionally, the normalization as medals is only one aspect of the complex interference between medals and neighboring genres. This contribution argues that the multiplication of reliefs by molding did not generate identical images, neither materially nor in terms of mediality, in any of the artifacts considered.