I’ve been spending time with Haberlin’s own aes grave collection here in Berlin. The really lovely thing about it is that I get to see many specimens of the same type at the same time to really get a feel for the characteristics and deep variation between the various specimens.
Many thoughts, too many for this blog post. But here is one. There is an uncanny similarity in size and shape between the wings of Pegasus on RRC 18/2 and the wing on Mercury’s helmet on RRC 14/1.
Also Haeberlin seems much more devoted to recording provenance for Asses than for smaller denominations. I have a strong suspicion that he acquired more of the Nemi material than his catalogue reports. I’d need to access his papers on some future trip to really know.
Finally thus far with only the occasional outlier (perhaps one specimen in 20) his weights are proving to be accurate against a modern well calibrated scale to a standard deviation of c. 0.4%. That is pretty darn accurate. But given the outliers which have been up to 6% difference, I feel I best keep re weighing as go.
I’m not even getting to his cast collection this trip–he tried to take a cast of every single aes grave he was not able to purchase that he ever help. Each cast has details of the original on the reverse. An amazing tool for provenance research given how few specimens relatively speaking he was able to illustrate on his plates.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 