WORDS OF COMFORT IN DISTRESSING TIMES. THE ICONOGRAPHY OF A SILVER MEDAL FROM 1630 - Henrik von Achen

A medal is struck or cast in order to convey a certain message or commemorate a certain event to a larger audience. In a communicative perspective, the medal is the smaller and more expensive equivalent to the graphic sheet. From an art historical point of view, a medal is simply a small, often circular shaped sculpture, a relief, an aesthetic object. The only difference compared to other reliefs, which evidently and traditionally are objects for art history as a scholarly discipline, is the medal usually being much smaller and produced in a large number of identical copies. Yet, there is no essential difference between medals and any other work of mass produced art. Hence the discipline of art history, or more precisely, the methods of iconography and iconology, have significant contributions to offer, when it comes to explaining what a certain medal conveys in terms of a visualized message supported, and often interpreted, by texts.

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