MIR is missing. CNI is missing. Unpublished date. Extremely rare.

Slight decentration at /R.

BB.

"Pellit et attrahit," or "push and drag": this is the evocative legend that characterizes the rare double wind coin of Ranuccio II Farnese, one of the most fascinating issues produced by the Parma mint in the 17th century. Its iconographic model is rooted in the Farnese tradition, inspired by a famous coin minted by his predecessor Ranuccio I for the Piacenza mint.

As Mario Traina recalls in his book Il linguaggio delle moneta (The Language of Coins), Ranuccio I, who succeeded his father Alessandro, who was engaged in military campaigns in Flanders, chose to depict on his coins the allegory of Aeolus blowing against the clouds, pushing them back and dragging them away. This image of great symbolic power was conceived to evoke the determination and courage required to defend the Duchy's future, virtues the young duke ideally intended to inherit from his father.

Following the same allegorical line, Ranuccio II also adopted this powerful iconography, entrusting its execution to the mintmaster Giovanni Gualtieri, whose initials appear on the obverse flanking the date. Only a few examples of this extremely rare typology are known today, all dated 1692 (ref. MIR 1030).

The 1690 vintage presented here appears on the market for the first time and must therefore be considered unpublished and never catalogued. The Corpus Nummorum Italicorum also notes the existence of a copper proof dated 1688 (ref. CNI 19), of which, however, no surviving examples are known, further proving that the coin's dies had already been prepared and officially completed well before 1690.

Apart from the slight decentration at the /R, the specimen is in an excellent state of conservation, with clear reliefs and no disfiguring defects.