Take your madre or punches, and since it almost always is a prince’s head that is cut into the pila, set to with the first piece of your combination, and, fitting each into its place, strike it a blow with the hammer, and lift hand and tool up as smartly and rapidly as you brought them down, for if the madre shift, even but ever so slightly, it will tend to blurr your work. In like manner add the limbs and the heads of your figures in such wise as your craft and your experience shall teach you, and so on similarly any other things, coats of arms, devices, beautiful alphabets, the beading for the coins’ border, till all are well fashioned in both pila and torsello. And since I should omit nothing for your better guidance, know that the hammer needful for stamping in the larger madre, such for instance as a head would need, ought to weigh about 4 lbs., while those requisite for the smaller punches may weigh less; those for the smallest of all—for the beading for instance—may be very tiny—each according!
When the sinking by both pila and torsello is completed, set to and file off the superfluous margin right up to your border of beading. See that it is strongly blunted[88] where you have filed it towards the beading, for without this your die would spoil and quickly perish, but where it is blunted it will not spoil. Then set to and temper your steel;[89] to this end you heat it, and let it glow, neither too much nor too little, but just sufficient to temper it aright. And forasmuch as in the tempering a film is formed that would tend to spoil your fair impression, you must take great care to prevent it. As we say in the craft, the dies should be rosso appunto, to the point of redness, neither more nor less; and to make them so you do this. You take some clean iron scale[90] and place it on a board and then rub pila and torsello alike on this until they are thoroughly bright, and the film quite gone from them, and in the same manner may you afterwards brighten your coins. And—another little hint—you clean out the deeper parts of your dies with pieces of pointed cork tipped with iron scale, & then everything is done & you can give your dies to the stamper, at the mint.
I must not forget to tell you, as I promised, how it was that the ancients never turned their coins out as well as we; & the reason of it was because they cut their dies out direct with goldsmith’s tools, gravers, chisels, punches, & that was very difficult for them to do, especially as the mints needed a large number of these dies—pile and torselli.
I need give you but one instance of what I mean, gentle reader, and you will see how right I am. On one occasion when I was making the dies for Pope Clement in Rome, I had to turn out thirty of these iron pile and torselli in one day; had I gone to work in the manner of the ancients, I could not have produced two, nor would they have been as good. Thus it was that the ancients had to employ a large number of die cutters, and these could never do their work as well as they wished to do it, having never attained our facility.
But now will I tell you of medals which the ancients made superlatively well; & whatever I may have omitted in dealing with coins I will make up for in treating of medals, so that you shall learn all in listening to both.
FOOTNOTES:
[79] See the ‘Vita,’ Symonds, Book I., xlii.
[80] Terribilissimi popolani.
[81] E ricci del Duca Alexandro.
[82] Meaning in the way Cellini describes them.