Reading the 25th anniversary volume of The Asylum, the journal of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society, I came across an article titled "Blunders, hoaxes and lost masterpieces from the numismatic literature of the Renaissance" by John Cunnally.
The article seeks to describe coins now known to be false, padua s and other copies, that were in collections documented during the boom of collecting coins that came with the expansion of the humanist movements across Europe. It brought to mind a couple of records of gold medallions of Carausius that I had recently noted.
Today we know of only three large base metal medallions of Carausius, all different, housed within the British Museum. It has been suggested by Toynbee that they may be off metal strikes and that there were gold versions also produced, now lost. This view is not universally accepted.
I came across a letter, on deposit at the John Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, of the antiquary William Stukeley to John Collins, dated 3rd September 1753. He was thanking Collins for the loan of some coins to engrave for the plates in the forthcoming second volume of his book Medallic History of Carausius. There is a passage in the letter where Stukeley notes that he has acquired a gold medallion of Carausius the size of a half crown. There is sadly no description of the reverse type in the letter and no sign of it engraved in the plates of the Medallic History. Was Stukeley bluffing, trying to make the recipient of the letter envious? Or did he, perhaps, discover the piece to be a fake?
That brings me on to the next large gold medallion of Carausius. Whilst searching for Stukeley's specimen in the Medallic History I came across a large votive piece at the top of plate XVI, coin 1.p
The medallion, noted by Stukeley as being in the collection of Jacomo Musselius of Verona, is of a reverse type wholly unknown in the repertoire of Carausius numismatics and is much more akin to the silver medallions of Constantius II. I wonder, as the piece is now lost, whether it is a fantasy piece, concocted from the description of the later fourth century medallions and if it ever existed beyond the illustration on the page.
