The “Cabinet of Modern Medals” (1780–1853)

In 1780, the “Mathematics Room” in the Uffizi was set up as the "Cabinet of the Modern Medals”. A reassessment of the gallery’s history from the eccentric viewpoint offered by this room and the items it housed from 1780 to 1853 is useful not only for discovering the changes that took place here, but also for understanding more subtle phenomena and practices related to the collections. In this essay we shall review three episodes on the basis of which the plans for the Room of “Modern Medals” were drawn up: the two Cabinets of “medals” (1738, 1775) and the short period, when the Map Terrace housed Greco-Roman antiquities in 1780. We shall then describe the arrangement of the Cabinet of “Modern Medals” completed between August 1780 and April 1784 and discuss its relations not only with eighteenth-century research on antiques, but also with the cultural practices of the court and the scholarly world. Lastly, we shall outline the main changes to the room and numismatic collections up to 1853, in an attempt to explain how and why this category of items remained length in an institution that was gradually becoming a museum dedicated to paintings and sculpture.