Displaying items by tag: coins

Think Victorian sculpture, and our minds immediately jump to Frederic Leighton’s athlete wrestling a python, one of the highlights of the Tate collection. It features in this exhibition and is a good benchmark for what Victorian sculpture was like — visually striking and with all the subtlety of a jewel encrusted pastoral staff, which happens to be another item on display in this show.

The show starts off slowly with medals, coins and busts of Queen Victoria made from different materials, but from then on in there is a selection of some breathtaking artifacts and sculpture.

An elderly Greek man was arrested for illegally obtaining a host of antiquities including more than a thousand coins of historical significance, police said on Monday.

Inside the 72-year-old man's house in Alexandria, a village in northern Greece, police found 1,061 copper coins, a thousand of which date from the Hellenistic period (third to first century BC), the Byzantine period (330-1453) and the Ottoman Empire.

Police said they were seized on Sunday, as well as 30 silver coins of the same periods, 16 copper rings and other jewelery of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine era.

A 2,000-year-old trove of rare bronze coins from a Late Second Temple Period Jewish settlement was discovered in Israel, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced today.

The discovery was made after pottery shards discovered several months ago, during construction to widen the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway, led archaeologists to continue their excavation.

"The hoard, which appears to have been buried several months prior to the fall of Jerusalem, provides us with a glimpse into the lives of Jews living on the outskirts of Jerusalem at the end of the rebellion," said IAA excavation directors Pablo Betzer and Eyal Marco in a press release.

Yale University Art Gallery will celebrate the completion of a multi-year, multi-million dollar renovation and expansion on December 12. The project cost $135 million and increased exhibition space by about one-third. The museum, which is located in New Haven, CT, now boasts nearly 70,000 square feet and includes a gallery devoted to African, Asian, and Pre-Columbian art that was designed by Louis Kahn in 1953, the Old Yale Art Gallery, which features ancient, European, and contemporary art, and the 1866 Street Hall. The project joined all three buildings to create one cohesive institution.

Besides the physical expansion, the Yale University Art Gallery has significantly increased its collection’s holdings. The museum acquired 1,100 new works including African terra-cotta figures, Greco-Roman coins, medals from the American Revolution, and marble portraits of Marcus Aurelius and Plato over 1,700 years old.

The expansion and renovation were designed and led by Duncan Hazard and Richard Olcott, partners in New York’s Ennead Architects. The project took 14 years to complete and outfitted the museum with new areas for exhibitions and object study and increased access to the Gallery’s comprehensive collections.