Stater (Silver, 12.26 g 2), 380, Hera mint, the 100th Olympiad, signed by Polykaon. F Head of Hera to right, wearing a stephane ornamented with five palmettes connected by tendrils. Rev. Eagle standing right, with his head turned back to left and his wings slightly raised; all within olive wreath; to right, above and below the eagles left wing, |; below wreath, []. Gulbenkian 542 (same dies). Katoché 290c (this coin). Kunstfreund 199 (this coin). Seltman 290 (EP/). Extremely rare, the fourth example known. Lightly toned, a magnificent coin, sharply struck and in high relief. Due to the high relief some of the high spots were not filled in striking (see Katoché p. 53, n. 20), otherwise, extremely fine.
From the collection of C. Gillet, 987, Bank Leu/Münzen und Medaillen 28 May 1974, 199, and from the Katoché Hoard of 1948 (IGCH 48). This is possibly the finest head of Hera within the entire repertoire of Greek numismatic art, and is surely one of the most beautiful of all the coins struck in the 4th century B.C. The goddess appears serene and has a majestic severity that is exactly right for her position as the queen of the gods. The regal bearing of this head is perfectly paralleled by Kimon’s equally severe heads of Arethusa on the second type of his dekadrachms, which were struck in Syracuse some twenty-five years earlier (Kraay/Hirmer 118-121). The eagle on the reverse (taken over from the traditional Zeus mint obverses – the thunderbolts now disappear from stater reverses) was equally powerful and lifelike; and is, in fact, one of the finest eagles ever to appear on a coin.The engraver who produced these dies was an absolute master, whom Seltman identified in Katoché (pp. 49-50) as an otherwise unknown Polykaon from his reading of the letters below the wreath on this coin, off the flan on the two other known examples (one in Berlin and the other once in the Petsalis collection). Jongkees (pp. 51-52), however, dated this coin to c. 400 and attempted to prove that the QO and the LYKA (a reading he did not accept) were two people, rather than being parts of the same name, and that the QO referred to Polykleitos the Younger, a sculptor who worked in the late 5th - early 4th centuries and was the grandson of the more famous Polykleitos who produced some of the most celebrated statues of the second half of the 5th century. This theory seems not to have been accepted by most other scholars. Polykaon signed a second reverse die (see the following lot) and, as we have seen, a number of eagle hemidrachms (above, lots 95, 98, and 102-103).
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