Volume 41, Number 20 · December 1, 1994
Character Witnesses
By Ingrid D. Rowland
The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance
edited by Stephen K. Scher, photography by John Bigelow Taylor
Abrams/The Frick Collection, 424 pp., $95.00
Sometimes the peculiar union of miniature portrait and metal disk can still bewitch us: when the insertion of a twenty-dollar bill into a vending machine brings forth a clattering rain of Susan B. Anthonys in change, or when Abraham Lincolns fall out of a piggy bank, or a good look at the face of a quarter makes us realize that George Washington, the father of his country, is probably wearing nothing more than a periwig and a hair ribbon.
Review, 4357 words
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