JEWELRY INCORPORATING ANCIENT COINS

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.

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.

To read the complete article, see:
From Ancient Coins Come Modern Jewelry (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/fashion/jewelry-ancient-coins.html)

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