ABSTRACT
The use of Alexander’s portrait on coins ended with late Roman contorniates, though the appreciation of his legend continued into the Middle Ages with alterations and elaborations through tales and stories. The Hellenistic and Roman Alexander Romance subsequently formed the base for spectacular and fantastic stories of an exemplary explorer, conqueror and king, a Christian knight or Muslim warrior.1 It was not until the Renaissance and its renewed interest in classical antiquity that Alexander himself reappeared on numismatic objects. Reading the famous authors from classical antiquity again, and subsequently collecting authentic coins created and reflected the desire for possessing true representations of the Great king. It is no wonder that Renaissance scholars attempted to identify such portraits of Alexander, and in doing so took the first exploratory steps into what would be an academic field in its own right in the future: numismatics, the study of (ancient) coinage.2
