On December 11th 1669 Caterina Sevasto, of an illustrious and powerful Greek family of Candia,
Crete, wife of Pietro
Zeno, a doctor of medicine, gave birth to a son, Apostolo
Zeno, in
Venice. Apostolo grew into a great academic and classicist. In 1691 he was among the founders of the Accademia degli Animosi. In 1695, he composed
his first libretto, Gli inganni felici, which obtained great
success, making him a fashionable librettist. From 1705, he worked with Pietro Pariati, keeping the theatrical scenes for himself and leaving to Pariati the composition of the libretti. He began
work as a literary journalist for the Galleria di
Minerva, also taking upon executive responsibilities, but distanced himself when he realized that he
had not succeeded in making the impact upon the publication that he intended. In the end he described it as an idiocy. In 1710 together with Scipione Maffei, Antonio Vallisneri and
his brother, Pier Caterino
Zeno, he founded the Giornale de' letterati d'Italia, maintaining that it was necessary that "Italians themselves make their own newspaper... revealing that
good sense, erudition and ingenuity never were lacking among us, and now more than ever are they flourishing." The tri-monthly publication
had prestigious contributors such as Scipione Maffei, Antonio Vallisneri, Eustachio Manfredi, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Giovan Battista Vico, Bernardino Ramazzini. Motivated above all by the desire to improve
Italian learning, it enjoyed considerable
success. When Apostolo
Zeno was called to duty as poet laureate to the imperial court of
Vienna in 1718,
his brother, Pier Caterino took over the direction until 1732, publishing the periodical annually. Apostolo remained in
Vienna until 1729, at which point he was replaced by Pietro Metastasio. He returned to
Venice, dedicating himself to works of erudition and to coin-collecting. Apostolo lived to age 81. Three years before
his death, in 1747, he donated
his coin
collection to the Monastery of Saint
Florian, an Augustinian monastery in the town of Sankt
Florian,
Austria. Founded in the early ninth century, and later refounded by Augustinians in the eleventh century, St.
Florian is the largest monastery in Upper
Austria, and rivals Melk Abbey and Klosterneuburg Monastery as among the most impressive examples of Baroque
architecture in
Austria. The monastery is dedicated to Saint
Florian, whose fourth century grave lies beneath the monastery. The coin
collection remained undisturbed at the monastery for two hundred years, until In January 1941 the premises were taken over by the Gestapo and the monks were expelled. From 1942 the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft ("Radio Society of the Third Reich") was based here under its general director Heinrich Glasmeier. The canons were able to return after the end of the war, but in much
reduced circumstances they made the difficult decision to sell the coin
collection of Apostolo
Zeno, in a series of Dorotheum sales in
Vienna between 1955 and 1957. At the time, and
still so far as I know today, it was the oldest securely
provenance coin
collection ever offered, beating by more than a hundred years the Duke of
Northumberland collection sold by Sotheby's in 1982 and dating from the early to mid 19th century. One of the attendees at that sale was a
French coin collector, who is
still with us but no longer collecting, because in late November 2014
his remarkable
collection of old-provenance coins, most dating from sales in the 1930s to 1950s, was sold in
Lyon,
France. I attach a copy of the collector's receipt from the 1956 Apostolo
Zeno sale. Included in the list of purchases, as lot 2955, and illustrated in enlargement in the 1956 sale was a
very fine denarius of
Octavian with
his youthful
head and the
symbols of pontificate on the
reverse, a coin that would have been acquired by Apostolo
Zeno perhaps around 1730. This coin, pictured below, will now be joining my
collection.
