Personification of Winter

CNG 106, Lot: 756. Estimate $500. Sold for $550. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

Anonymous issues. temp. Hadrian–Antoninus Pius, AD 117-161. Æ Quadrans or Semis (16mm, 3.23 g, 11h). Laureate and veiled youthful bust of the personification of Winter right / Large S • C within olive wreath. RIC II 35; Van Heesch 1, pl. XXV, 4; cf. Weigel fig. 21 (Summer); Kestner, Tesseren 33; Cohen 30. Good VF, green patina.

Ex Collection of a Classicist.

Mattingly originally assigned this type to the large number of anonymous quadrantes issued in the general period of the late first and early second centuries. He dismissed the assertion of Cohen, however, who gave it to Annius Verus, the deceased twin of the emperor Commodus. The presence of several consistent varieties of the type prompted Van Heesch to retain the Antonine attribution, but to identify the portraits instead as personifications of the seasons, representations of the abundance present in Rome's "Golden Age."