Marcel Jovine

Marcel Jovine's path to the US Mint ran through a prisoner-of-war camp.

He was born in 1921 in Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples, and trained at the Italian military academy, where he took up drawing. During the Second World War he served in the Italian army and was captured in North Africa. Shipped across the Atlantic, he spent his captivity in a POW camp in Pennsylvania — and kept drawing. The story goes that he met his future wife, Angela, when she came to play piano for the prisoners.

After the war he was repatriated to Italy, then returned to the United States to marry her and stay. He Americanized "Marcello" to Marcel and went looking for work as an artist — first dressing store windows, then designing toys.

That second career is the one most Americans actually touched. Working from his home in New Jersey, Jovine designed the Visible Man and Visible Woman — the clear-plastic anatomy kits, organs and skeleton snapping into a see-through body, that sat on a generation of classroom shelves. An earlier hit, a baby doll he cooked up in rubber on his own stove, he sold to the Ideal Toy Company. The toys paid the bills. Sculpture was the work he kept returning to.

In the 1970s Jovine turned seriously to medallic sculpture — the art of carving in shallow relief for objects you hold in your hand. A coin is the hardest version of that art: the whole composition has to read at the size of a thumbnail, in metal, struck millions of times from a single steel die (the hardened tool that stamps the design). Get the relief — how high the design stands off the field — even slightly wrong, and the press can't fill it.

He learned the discipline on art medals before he ever touched a coin. He worked for years with the Medallic Art Company, struck calendar medals (a Statue of Liberty in 1986, an eagle in 1987), and produced issues for the Society of Medalists. In 1983 he co-designed the American Numismatic Society's 125th-anniversary medal, which pictured the ancient craft of striking coins by hand — a fitting subject for a man about to spend two decades doing the modern version.

When the US Mint's commemorative program took off in the 1980s, Jovine became one of its busiest outside designers. His coin work has a recognizable instinct: bold, legible, emblem-forward. A single eagle with a quill. A flame under five rings. He liked one strong image carrying the whole face, rather than a crowded scene.

His clearest statement is the 1987 Constitution Bicentennial gold five-dollar coin — the only one of his US coins where he designed both sides. The obverse (the "heads" side) shows a stylized eagle clutching a quill pen against bursting sun rays; the reverse turns that quill into a single vertical feather, ringed by stars for the states that ratified. It is a whole document — the act of signing a constitution — compressed into two small gold faces.