LUDWIG HÖRMAN OF AUGSBURG 1580

[constanius]

LVDWIG HÖRMAN . ÆTA(tis) . LXV . A(nno) . 80 = Ludwig Hörman(n) aged 65 in the year (15)80. High-relief 40mm x 30mm oval cast lead medal. The prominent forked beard with the ruff collar reflects the then current Spanish-Italian style. The angled front facing, rather than linear, view allows for the very high-relief.

Dr Habich ascribes this medal to Balduin Drentwett(Germ 1545-1627), who introduced wax modeling to, and worked in, Augsburg from the begining of the 1570's until his death. Before that the medals in Augsburg were mostly made using wooden models.

Habich.II. Group 1580-1586 : #2951

1580. Ludwig Hörmann (Hermann), Augsburg Councillor & Merchant. Munich.

Ludwig was born into an elite Augsburg family on 5 December 1515 & died 8 March 1588. As a young man he was a factor for Anton Fugger in Naples, when he returned, in 1543, to Augsburg he married Regina, the daughter of Anton Haug, and became a partner in the Haug-Langnauer-Linck company. In the 1560's this company became involved in mining ventures in Elizabethan England and developed the mines in Keswick, Buttermere, Grossmere and Cumberland, they brought 1000 Tyrolean miners to England. They were, writes W. G. Collingwood in his Elizabethan Keswick, Extracts from the Original Account Books, 1564-1577, of the German Miners in the Archives of Augsburg (1912), ‘already great dealers in silks, cloths, and draperies, in groceries and the spices of the East Indies, and like other wealthy business men of the time, in banking and bill discounting. They had widespread branches, reaching from Venice to Antwerp and from Cracow to Lyons; and though not originally interested in mines, they had recently taken over from the successor of the famous Augsburg house of the Fuggers the control of the copper mines of Neusohl in Northern Hungary. One of their branches was at Schwatz, in Tyrol, near Innsbruck, a celebrated mining centre, where silver, copper, and iron were produced ; and we find… that it was from Schwatz that some of the first miners were sent by them to England’.

Elizabeth being Protestant & some of her great northen lords being Catholic was a cause for concern, as the mines in their areas could potentially be used to fund rebellion. So to have both the expertise of German miners & their being Protestants was a double blessing for her.

[Art1.2]

Neat medal and info. Cast lead, was it common for medals in that timeframe?

[constanius]

Neat medal and info. Cast lead, was it common for medals in that timeframe?

Thanks for the question Art, it was very common. Here are just some renaissance medals from one auction, all are lead.

 

From an earlier post, http://www.coinpeople.com/index.php/topic/33872-francois-miron-the-beautification-of-the-city-of-paris-1606/ with some editing; (there is more medallic info in that post, but you can see it is a learning process for me, re renaissance medals.

Did some more research on Renaissance cast medals re their metallic composition.

Bronzes; alloys of copper, tin, zinc and lead, with impurities such as iron, nickel, silver, antimony and arsenic.

Bronze types; tin bronze, leaded bronze, quaternary bronze(also known as leaded gun metal)

Brass types; medium-zinc, low-zinc.

Lead added to an alloy for casting enables it to be more fluid & flow easier into a mold.

Antimony; Expands on cooling, this unique charateristic allows the finest details of the mold to be preserved, it imparts hardness & a smooth finish to alloys containing lead.

Arsenic; adds hardness to the lead in leaded bronze(which typically contain 6% to over 10% lead)

Most descriptions of the medals(in literature or auction catalogs) just state bronze or lead, so the ones described as lead must in fact be leaded bronze(bronze with a high level of lead) or leaded gun metal. Hence unlike the 19th century trial strikes using just very soft lead(which is highly purified & was unavailable in renaissance times) so as to not damage an unhardened die, the lead renaissance medals are hard & not easily damaged. So these lead medals are not trial strikes, because with a cast medal there is no die to test before hardening it for use.

The high lead content was not just for reducing the expense of the materials used in producing the medals the lead added to an alloy for casting enabled it to be more fluid & flow easier into the mold.

[constanius]

I have always like the angled view of the face on this medal, which allows for high relief and a more natural look as compared to side or frontal view.

 

Well thanks to http://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=suchen&l=de I have managed to find 2 of the Fugger family portraits with 2 brothers approximately the same age as Ludwig and contemporary to him. These paintings match, in style of beard, ruff and angle of the face, the medal. Just a few years before and a few years after this time the Fugger family paintings are so different.

 

Ludwig's medal might have been copied from a painting.