A regular riot of fakery, combined with the most fantastic metamorphoses of Greek and Roman originals, existed for the benefit of crazy numismatists, greedy collectors of medals and amateurs with a fancy for small bronze bas-reliefs. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the imitation of coins was most varied; some are quite excellent reproductions of the antique ones, others again show the art and style of the artist and his period but faintly disguised. Some of these latter are at any rate charming works of art. The coins, medals and small bronzes seem to emphasize the Renaissance mania for the antique. Now, for instance, after giving the portrait of Adam, Eve, Noah and Ham, Shem and Japhet, the _Promptuarium iconum insigniorum a seculo hominum_, published in Lyons by Guillaume Reville (1553), gives other engravings purporting to be authentic portraits of various personages of antiquity. As a matter of fact many of these portraits are copied from old medals that were circulating at the time, the work of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Mr. Courajod, the former curator of the Louvre Museum, was able to prove this by finding some of the medals from which the portraits of the _Promptuarium iconum_ had been copied. These portray Antigone, the lieutenant of Alexander the Great, the king of Phrygia, Lysimachus, king of Thrace. The first, an Italian bronze of the fifteenth century, is characteristic for the effort made by the artist to counterfeit the Oriental style he may have noticed, perhaps, in other coins of the time. But, as we have said, where the fancy of the faker really ran riot was in those small bronzes of various origin and still more various purpose, nowadays called _plaquettes_. These bronzes were sometimes cast from the form of an old cameo, at others they imitated or aped a like origin, and whether they may have been used as buttons, pommels of the hilts of swords, or simply been demanded by collectors, they were for the most part imitations of the antique. In these works the metamorphoses of the original are at times so numerous and so absurd as to puzzle the modern collector and cause him to speculate on the acumen of some of the connoisseurs of the past. With some of these small bronzes the metamorphosis is not in the form but in the inscription that sometimes accompanies the _plaquette_, but on other occasions the subject and the figures are considerably altered. As an example of the former we may quote the supposed portrait of Julius Cæsar of the Courajod collection. In this case the _plaquette_ bears the inscription “IVLLIVS C. . PP . PM.”, which has caused the wrong naming of this bas-relief, for an identical _plaquette_, formerly in the collection of Mr. Bardini of Florence, seems to indicate that it must be a question of Cicero. The second inscription runs thus, “M. TVLLIVS .C.P.P.P.M.”