Search


CNG Bidding Platform

Information

Products and Services



Research Coins: Electronic Auction

 
411, Lot: 372. Estimate $500.
Sold for $950. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

The Republicans. Cn. Domitius L.f. Ahenobarbus. 41-40 BC. AR Denarius (19mm, 3.81 g, 2h). Uncertain mint in the region of the Adriatic or Ionian Sea. Bare head right / Prow right, surmounted by a military trophy. Crawford 519/2; CRI 339; Sydenham 1177; Domitia 21; Type as RBW 1803. VF, attractively toned, a couple of obverse banker’s marks.


From the Andrew McCabe Collection. Classical Numismatic Group 49 (17 March 1999), lot 1296; Peus 353 (29 October 1997), lot 335; Lanz 78 (25 November 1996), lot 482.

A classic veristic portrait of the late Republic. Veristic portraits have a distinct visual idiom, one which favors wrinkles, furrows, and signs of age as indicators of gravity and authority. Toynbee (Roman Historical Portraits, 1978) notes the characteristics of this portrait as having a high brow, thin face, short beard, long straight nose, and a slender neck, and considers it likely to depict the moneyer, Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, Cos. 32, rather than an ancestor, given its relatively young age for the subject of a veristic portrait; the portrait of the older “grossly fat” man on the associated aureus might well be his father, Lucius, Cos. 54, whose portrait matches a bust in the Vatican. Age during the Late Republic was highly valued and considered synonymous with power, given that a Roman had to be at least forty-two years old to achieve the consulship. Lahusen (Die Bildnismünzen der Römischen Republik, 1989) assembled a corpus of this denarius type, illustrating over 100 examples known to him. Lahusen notes a “strong emphasis on the vertical with a long narrow head on an unusually long neck, a high forehead, a light beard and a long straight nose, a small opened mouth, sunken cheeks and a deep brow furrow, a relatively large eye with an indication of the eyelashes. The contour of the head and its proportions make it look inappropriate for reproduction on coin.” [Andrew McCabe]