Nummorum imagines circumdatae sunt armis et tropaeis et aquilis ad ornatum. Antonio Cocchi inventaria le monete degli Uffizi con le incisioni del Piccini alla mano
In: Archeologia Classica: 62, 2011
Permalink: http://digital.casalini.it/2634574
In 1738 Antonio Cocchi, grand-ducal physician and antiquarian, set about cataloguing
the Coin Cabinet of the Uffizi Gallery with the help of various texts including the volume of
plates entitled Numismata aerea maximi moduli, primique duodecim Augusti ex auro dudum
Romae in coenobio Carthusiae, nunc Viennae Austriae in gaza Caesarea.
Only a decade after
the first edition appeared the volume had become rare and Cocchi began to wonder about
the year it was printed and the engraver, regretting the lack of an explicative text on coins.
This article recounts the vicissitudes of this rare volume of plates elegantly engraved by
Gaetano Piccini, which illustrates the numismatic collection conserved in the first half of the 18th century by the Carthusian monks of the Roman monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
It also accounts for the two editions, the first published before the sale of the coin
cabinet to Charles VI of Hapsburg, and the other "clandestine", datable to 1727 and produced without the authorisation of the Viennese court, which had also acquired the copperplates. Finally, it describes how the engravings by Piccini were again published in Vienna
in 1755 in the second part of the sumptuous Numismata Cimelii Caesarei Regii Austriaci
Vindobonensis,
where the name of Gaetano Piccini seems to have been deliberately omitted.
Alongside the history of the volume is that of the coin cabinet assembled by father Jean
Marie de Rochefort, attorney general of the Carthusians, and in particular of the sale, compromised by the presence of fake coins and the clandestine edition of the volume brought
out by Daniele Antonio Bertoli on the instigation of Alessandro Gregorio Capponi.