The Social Lives of Coins in Eighteenth-Century Peru

• In Event: Making and Valuing Money in the Americas, 17th – 19th centuries

Abstract

Authorities and individuals in the Spain’s imperial colonies used numismatics to confront the challenge of representing political transition in royal portraiture. Official portrait models were slow to reach America, and artists struggled to keep up, relying upon rough substitution or imagination of the king’s physiognomy. Imagined royal portraits appeared on three types of coins produced in American mints between 1732 and 1824: prosopography portraits, “error coins,” and imagined portraits.
The social lives of coins visually and materially recall a global network of economic exchange at a moment when Spanish imperial rule came under attack from all sides. Historical travel accounts, reports of shifts in minting technologies, and numismatic portrait descriptions indicate that late-colonial portrait coins participated in Iberoamerican debates regarding the nature of kingship, royal lineage, and dynastic succession. Coins visualized the malleability of the human body, not simply iconographically, but by recalling the coercive processes which their raw materials were obtained, particularly the bodily manipulation and abuse of subject populations.
The manipulation of the royal visage on American portrait coinage paralleled the social contortion of American bodies throughout the early modern period. American coinage in the eighteenth century afforded an international cohort of individuals an intimate viewing experience that, although far from contemplative, was repetitive and integrated into the sphere of daily life. Minted portrait coins established the creative configuration of the royal visage as a visual strategy designed to confront the challenge of representing political change in imperial governance.

Author

• Emily A Engel, University of California Santa Barbara