You might be surprised to know that “Modern Uses of Old Coins” — a New York Times article about what it called the “popular craze” for jewelry set with ancient coins — was published in 1881. But Joost van Rossum, a Dutch lawyer living in Chicago, was not.
As the founder of Peregrine Pendants, an online business specializing in such jewelry, he knew the genre had been a popular style for some time — and added that it was “very neat” to be among the scores of artisanal jewelers today working with a lot of those same coins.
Mr. van Rossum, 35, had been collecting coins for about two years. But when he found himself “wanting to wear them,” he said, he began to teach himself how to work with gold. “Now, it’s this side thing that I love.”
To create pendants, for example, he framed a Roman silver denarius in 18-karat gold accented with aquamarine and sapphire cabochons ($1,375) and he looped 18-karat gold rings through two holes that had been bored previously into a Roman aureus, so it could hang from a chain ($4,750).
Most of the coins Mr. van Rossum uses were struck in the Greco-Roman world from 475 B.C. to A.D. 500. He deals with what he described as medium-worn coins because people — “myself included,” he said — liked to see some wear. “People don’t want mint.”
And customers typically choose coins for their images, he said. His best sellers include the Athenian silver tetradrachm, which has a saucer-eye owl and olive branches — it was the “dollar of its day in the Mediterranean,” he said — and the Roman bronze follis, which shows a she-wolf suckling the twins Romulus and Remus, a well-known symbol of the founding of Rome. “Medusa is popular. Pegasus is popular,” he added.
So too is this genre of jewelry: “We’ve been making coin jewelry for as long as we’ve been making coins,” he said.
A Tidal Trend
Examples of coin jewelry before the Roman period are “extremely rare,” said Jack Ogden, a jewelry historian and author in England.
Such jewelry — called gemme numari, a Latin phrase meaning coin gems — did not really become fashionable until the Roman Empire, he said: “Around the third century A.D. is when you start to get pendants and occasionally rings.”
Mr. Ogden noted that jewelry with ancient coins was “like the tide.” After almost disappearing from Europe by the 11th century, for example, it reappeared on elites during the 16th century and then almost disappeared again during the Baroque and Georgian eras, when gems, pearls and enamel were favored, he said.
“Something lights the fuse again,” Mr. Ogden said, pointing to how public interest in archaeology in the 1800s led to what he described as a “great revival” of ancient coin jewelry in Europe. For a modern example he cited Bulgari’s Monete line, introduced in the 1960s to showcase antique Roman, Greek and Persian coins and still sold today.
Now, Mr. Ogden said, “high-end and artisan jewelers are continuing the 19th-century tradition of using authentic, verifiable ancient coins, marketing them as ‘wearable history’.”
Modern Takes
Francesca Ruggiero, 54, works with ancient coins, many of which reflect the Greco-Roman heritage of her hometown, Naples, Italy.
The jeweler — whose brand, Kiaia, is headquartered in London and has its workshop in Naples — includes silver coins that depict the Greek goddess Athena. For a pair of earrings, she set each one in 18-karat gold with a three-diamond chain leading to a disc of blackened silver (4,300 pounds, or $5,660).
“It is a way to wear history, and I like that this is not a new trend; that this is something people have always liked,” Ms. Ruggiero said.
Gina Marie Pinzari, the goldsmith behind Talking Tree Jewelry, near Occidental, Calif., finds Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Mughal, Celtic, Chinese and Spanish colonial coins from numismatists for her necklaces, bracelets, earrings and rings. “When I hold them, it puts my little life into perspective,” she said. “The coins have probably been through so many hands.”
She said that clients often asked her to find coins related to their ancestry. For example, after searching out a coppery coin from medieval Armenia, Ms. Pinzari, 39, set it into a pendant of textured silver with 18-karat gold bead accents and a green tsavorite ($2,500).
Eli Halili is a jeweler whose New York City brand puts ancient coins into minimalist gold designs. “You could wear it thousands of years ago, you could wear it today,” he said.
He has set a Greek silver drachm — depicting the nymph Larissa and dating to about 400 B.C. — into a 22-karat gold signet-like ring ($23,000), and created a brown leather cord bracelet featuring a Judean bronze prutah coin with a palm leaf in a 22-karat gold bezel ($4,500).
Mr. Halili, 46, advises his clients to protect the patina on bronze coins by avoiding contact with saltwater and perfume. The patinas, which include deep brown, whitish and blue-green shades, and the irregular outlines of ancient coins “should be treasured,” he said. “You rarely find a perfect circle, and a coin’s thickness might grow from 2 to 6 millimeters, and you have to follow its shape with the gold.”
Treasure Too
Some coin jewelry incorporates actual treasure.
During a video interview from Key West, Fla., Blake Baker looked down at the chain around his neck and its pendant coin, impressed with lions, castles and a crown. It was one of about 150,000 eight reales (coins often called “pieces of eight”) recovered from the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a Spanish treasure ship that sank in the area in 1622.
Mr. Baker was given the coin in 2024 to mark his first year as the lead diver and first mate of operations at Mel Fisher’s Treasures, a company operated by the family of the treasure hunter whose team found the Atocha’s main cache in 1985. (Mr. Fisher died in 1998.)
Mr. Baker, 27, had the coin set into a silver bezel with 14k-gold prongs and a cutlass motif — a reference, he said, to his nickname, Buccaneer Blake. “It’s a real legacy piece,” he said with a laugh.
For decades the Fisher company has worked with jewelers in the Key West area to create silver or gold coin pendants, rings and other items ($2,600 to $95,000) sold through its online store.
The Atocha discovery was such a sensation in the Keys that treasure coin jewelry became hugely popular — and pendants made with the shipwreck’s coins now are known as “Key West dog tags,” Mr. Baker said.
“Wearing these coins was a very local thing — and still is.”
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