Roma Resurgens: Papal Medals from the Age of the Baroque

1 July–9 August 1981

Papal medals served as great instruments of propaganda during the great Catholic revival following the schism created by the Protestant Reformation. The medals depict on one side a portrait of the current pope, and on the other, an idealized heroic image of a papal act. The images were meant to be persuasive in chronicling the rebirth of Rome as a great city under the popes. This exhibition of 172 medals from the 16th to the 18th centuries was brought together for the first time in an exhibition that began at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum before traveling to the Smart Museum, and ending at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The exhibition was accompanied by a series of lectures delivered by Edward A. Maser, Smart Museum Director.

Curator: Professors Nathan Whitman of the University of Michigan and John Varriano of Mount Holyoke College.

Funding was provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

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