Indeed. It seems the main mistake was touching up the mould without any knowledge of what they were looking at, nor using a photo as a guide.
The source coin is in the BnF, so one can imagine the visiting perpetrator trying to clandestinely make a mould of the coin, only somewhat successfully, then making this sub-par effort to clean things up when they got home.
The "drapery" details on the copy do, at large scale, follow those on the original, just that by not understanding what they were looking at, it's gone a bit wrong!
to Heliodromus,
Some
additions. As I said, the pictures I attached to my previous post are those of an authentic
medallion showing the same pair of dies as the
fake medallion, which happens to be in
Paris,
BnF (by the way, Heliodromus, could you consider precising the origin of these pics [©Sylviane
Estiot, Centre national de la recherche scientifique,
France] or at least ask for permission to reuse...).
This doesn't mean that the
fake has been
cast on the
Paris medallion, as you suppose. I know at least 4 other medallions from the same pair of dies from public
collections (including fac-similés, as the curators of public coin cabinets in the 19th cent.
had the habit to exchange metallic copies of
Roman medallions in order to fill in the vacuums on their trays, or just exempli gratia): each one could be the candidate prototype for the
fake.
The presumed
fake has a
pedigree from some decades (see Oslo Myntgalleri AS 28, May, 6 2022, lot 401). For this
medallion type:
Gnecchi II, p. 124-125,10; pl. 124,5 (rather numerous medallions of Diocletianus sole emperor, from different dies). Final remark : the
obverse die of the
MONETA AVG (
Augusti) medallions we are talking about is
still in use to strike
MONETA AVGG (Augustorum, i.e. Diocletianus and
Maximianus) medallions, see die link Gn. pl. 124,5 and 124,8.
S.
Estiot