Newest Acquisition Maximinus II

Bronze at its best is worthy of serious attention. Glad to see your foray into the "dark side." It is nice indeed.

Excellent strike, great details and eye appeal. Nice pick up.

OH WOW!! This is one heck of a coin!

if you have the opportunity to buy such a coin , do it , you will never regret .It is a very nice coin everybody wants to have in its collection .For the portraiture , there is in my opinion no declining , but an evolution in the perception of art . With Maximianus , we are at the end of the 3th century and the artistic expression is no more the same as 100 years earlier .Compare it with the contemporary evolution and try to understand ,but it is often difficult,especially for me. albert

Is contemporary art in the US a degenerated form? Be careful where you ask that (or answer it). Art evolves in keeping with philosophy.

Albert is correct, but it is easy to miss the point. By the time Maximian was throne-worthy, artistic convention had evolved to the point that a realistic portrait image was regarded as too limiting for emblems of state, such as coinage. The design plan by this time wanted the effigy of the emperor to be emblematic. That is, idealized and not literal.

After two centuries of deification, the emperor cult had largely out-paced the old pagan order, throwing the religion into a state of disorder. Small wonder that by 313-325 the mood was right for something completely different; i.e. Christianity. But the artwork, reflecting a change in role, makes the emperor a personification of the state.

For that, you don't want to be too literal. Hence the tendency for one visage to look a lot like another. But for coins, that's what you want, if you are the head of state. The verisimilitude of the imagery which had given a sense of stability and reliability to the coins, and the currency of which they were a part, gives way to the stability of common emblems of a tetrarchy in which authority is shared. Or so they hoped.

Those who prefer realism in art won't be happy with that, but that wasn't our time.

I recently acquired this coin as well as an incredible portrait Pius Denarius. So I can see first hand Lucky's observation that the obverse portraits of the coins of the 4th century C.E no longer adhere to the realism of the 1st or 2nd Century ones. I get a feel for how Pius really looked, a man in middle age, care worn from his work as Emperor. Whereas Maximinus II seems to have becomes a well fed brutish and thickset Demi-God. No doubt beginning with Diocletian a new aura was to surround the Emperors and this new era brought many changes including to currency. Personally I prefer the realism of the early Empire,but I will not take from the skill and beauty of these later coins, especially the reverses.