Simbolo, metafora, allegoria: l'ape nelle monete e nelle medaglie, tra mito e realtà, nella storia e nella cultura

[Autom. eng. transl.] Non-mute witnesses of ancient city-states and republics, of kingdoms and empires, of socio-economic and political-dynastic vicissitudes of single places or entire regions, coins offer to numismatic science, the auxiliary of history, the possibility to expand on a good part of the three-thousandth period of time that saw the progress of many civilizations in the succession of eras. These objects are also a source of knowledge for art historians, iconographic scholars, heraldists and, more generally, for anyone interested in looking for some non-ephemeral messages for contemporaries for their research field. and posterity: not only the issuing authority and guarantor of the intrinsic value of the metal, but also the emblems, the mottos, the historical facts, the relationship between man and nature and the supernatural, etc. In summary: culture, the path of civilized humanity. The art of the medal, more belated, with its marked celebratory and commemorative character has emphasized certain qualities of the coin, extending its expressive potential and communicative richness. Insects appear in the numbers some centuries before Christ. It is the multicentric civilization of the Hellas, radiated in the flourishing colonies of the Ionia, of the Magna Greece and in Sicily, to draw for first also to the entomies to translate in the coins certain symbolic valences. The thundering cicada, the noxious locust, the industrious ant, the Egyptian filiation beetle and obviously also the bee - see for example the coinage of the Ionian Ephesus in the IV-III century BC - thus appear in coins of some póleis of the world Hellenic, often alongside the effigy of local tutelary gods of which even these 'minor' animals are sometimes symbolic. In his encyclopedic work on insects (De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem, the editio princeps is from 1602), Ulisse Aldrovandi will not fail to treat and illustrate, among the first if not first, this border topic between humanistic culture and scientific knowledge. The bee has always been the most important insect for humans. For honey, a 'divine' food for the ancients, but also for wax, whose importance in past centuries today we risk not fully evaluating. But the bee and the hive become a recurring emblem, a metaphor of values and virtues, an allegory of beliefs and ideals, thanks also or above all to other prerogatives: the orderly social organization under the guidance of what until the seventeenth century he believed he was a king; the skilful construction of honeycombs in cells of geometric precision; the reproduction that was thought to be only parthenogenetic, therefore a symbol of chastity; the frantic, tireless fulfillment of tasks of which the solar relationship with the blooms and the provident establishment of food reserves are primary expressions. Complex beekeeping depictions, with allegorical meanings, are found in the coinage and Renaissance medallions of the Este Duchy. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the symbolism of papal medals (by Leone XI de 'Medici) emerges with symbolic value in the iconography of spontaneous generation of bee swarms from large mammal carcasses (in the case, a lion), and of which we know today to give a rational explanation. In this summary and inevitably incomplete excursus, the heraldic trine of bees of Urban VIII Barberini, imprinted also in coins, and which gave impetus to the morphological study of the bee, as a tribute to the pontiff, cannot be ignored. part of the early Lincei; or, much more recently, the hive that certain credit institutions have chosen to symbolize work and savings, even in medals. These are just some of the expressions of a multi-millennial bond that accompanies the history of humanity and is also reflected in these non-secondary testimonies of