Abstract

In 1903 the German art historian Karl Giehlow argued that a 1514 treatise on Greek numismatics, written by the Augsburg humanist Conrad Peutinger and addressed to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, shed new light on Albrecht Dürer’s mysterious engraving Melencolia I. Since the treatise has never been published, the question has never been investigated. This article presents a transcription, commentary and translation of the treatise for the first time in any language. It also situates Peutinger’s work within the history of scholarship on Greek antiquity and the history of German Renaissance art. The central concern of Peutinger’s treatise turns out to be a precocious and unexpected one: neither the exploits of the ancient hero whom the coin in question depicts, nor the possible lineage of the Habsburg emperor back to Hercules, but the material history of religion on an island in the Hellenistic Aegean. The article describes the leaps and misunderstandings that led Peutinger to endow his object, an everyday piece of ancient currency, with artistic significance and a sacred aura. PaceGiehlow, it is not the Melencolia I that is illuminated by the text, but artworks produced locally: the Prayer Book of Maximilian and the classical and sacred craftsmanship of an Augsburg goldsmith. The interpretation of Greek artworks did not just influence the art of a Christian city: Christian art, on the evening of the Reformation, coloured the interpretation of Greece.