Lot 126: [ ITALIAN MEDALS ]

LEONE LEONI (c. 1509-1590) Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517-1586), as Bishop of Arras, silver medal, c. 1549, ANT PERRENOT EPI ATREBATEN, bust to left wearing gown; incised on truncation, LEO, rev., Aeneas steering his ship through a tempest, thunderbolts and hail stones raining down from above and with a man rowing a small boat in the foreground; DVRATE inscribed on a banner below, 65mm (Attwood 33; Armand I, 166, 19; Middeldorf/Stiebral LV, this piece), a very fine contemporary cast

Provenance: 'The Property of a Late Collector', Sotheby's, 12 June 1974, lot 257; Morton & Eden, 14 June 2007, lot 569. The reverse scene of this very rare medal is taken from Virgil's Aeneid and the word Durate (endure) is part of Aeneas' exhortation to his men (Aeneid, i, 207). The important Netherlandish medallist Jacques Jonghelinck, who studied under Leoni in Milan, employed a version of it in a series of medals of Granvelle made in the early 1560s.