In the highways and byways of art collecting, the byways are often worth the detour. One such trip leads into the obscure yet delightful field of 19th-century artist’s medals. To the non-aficionado, the word "medal" has a military or numismatic connotation, but the artist’s medal is to the medal of officialdom as the artist’s book is to the stock at your local Barnes & Noble. These particular medals are really miniature works of sculpture, expressions not of government propaganda but of artistic vision.

The idea of commemorating great men and women and great public events on round pieces of metal began with the coinage of ancient Greece and Rome, and the first appearance of medals proper—as commemorative objects, without currency value—was during the European Middle Ages. But it was the Italian Renaissance that gave the medal artistic élan, and the credit for elevating medal-making above the rank of craft goes to one man, Pisanello. A master of the late-Gothic International Style in painting and an acute student of nature as a draftsman, Pisanello pioneered the technique of sand-casting bronze medals, which allows for greater refinement of line and surface texture than the older, cruder method of striking from a die. Pisanello’s first medal, made in 1438, most likely at Ferrara, portrayed the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus, and Pisanello went on to dignify various members of the Sforza, Este and Gonzaga clans with his medallic art. Among the great practitioners in this medium in the days of its first glory was Benvenuto Cellini, who made beautiful medals for Francis I of France, Pope Clement VII and Cardinal Bembo.

After the 16th century, medal-making went into aesthetic decline. The new technology of the screw press made it possible to strike designs into metal with greater precision than before, and the time-consuming method of casting fell out of use. The warm, almost informal liveliness of Italian Renaissance medals gave way to a kind of machine-like regularity, and the iconography of medals tended to become rigid and politically strident. It was not until the early 19th century that the true art of the medal was revived, and once again, that was accomplished basically by one man—Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, the modern Pisanello.

In a backhanded way, David’s revival of medal making was courtesy of Napoleon’s egomania. France’s national museum director, Vivant Denon, had the idea of creating a series of medals to commemorate the emperor’s deeds, and so created a Prix de Rome category for medalists. The winner would enjoy a pension at the Villa Medici in Rome; in 1815 David d’Angers took the prize. While at the Villa, he was inspired to do medallic portraits of his fellow pensionnaires—artists, musicians, architects. In 1827, he began what he called his Galerie des Contemporains, a massive project that eventually numbered some 500 medals. David’s designs reflect the spiritual energy of the Romantic movement of which he was a part, and his genius was to apply a form traditionally associated with public pomp and circumstance to a more intimate realm. These medals were not commissioned; instead, David chose the subjects he felt were worthy. In his Romantic vision, creative people are the true heroes.

According to David and Constance Yates, New York private dealers who have a specialty in medals, David’s artist subjects are the most attractive to collectors, and the hardest to find. Among these are Ingres, Poussin (not a contemporary, of course, but a kindred spirit) and Caspar David Friedrich. Close behind are other Romantic figures, especially writers and composers such as Goethe, Paganini, Gounod and Alfred de Musset. The latter is particularly striking for its three-quarter view instead of the usual profile, and for the modeling of the handsome novelist’s luxuriant, wavy hair. David’s portrait of Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy of the United States Navy features a full-face view, and has a romantic back story. Levy had purchased Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home, Monticello, and commissioned David, a passionate democrat and an admirer of Jefferson, to create the bronze statue of the late president that now stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. David returned the honor by doing a medal of Levy, which is considered, says Constance Yates, "one of the first great portraits of an American Jew."

The French critic Roger Marx vividly expressed the approach of David d’Angers and those who carried on his tradition: "One creates a medal as one engraves a printing plate, as one paints a picture, as one models a statue—for the sole pleasure of making a creative work, by virtue of the artist’s right to freely select the most appropriate modes of expression and technique to translate his dream." In the case of the cast medal, the technique consisted of modeling in wax to make a mold, then casting in sand followed by hand finishing ("chasing") with sandpaper and a graving tool to bring out the lines of the relief.

Cast medals are generally larger than struck medals, ranging from around three to nine inches in diameter (a few are square or rectangular), and because of the intricacy of the process, relatively few were cast from each mold; thus their rarity. Constance Yates compares them to another category of artistic multiples: prints. In addition to imagery, rarity and condition, factors that influence price and desirability are the quality of the chasing and the patination that a medal acquires over time—sometimes purplish tints, sometimes green or brown. Later casts often look "almost like they’re made out of chocolate," says Yates, which is not what the collector wants. Some medals are in gilt or silvered bronze, or very rarely, even in solid silver. Prices range from under $1,000—at which level one can still obtain consequential material—to around $5,000 for a rare piece by David d’Angers in top condition. At Sotheby’s sale of the medal and sculpture collection of David Daniels in 2002 in New York, an example of the Alfred de Musset went for $5,100.