Anthony de Francisci

Anthony de Francisci arrived in New York in 1905, a teenager from Palermo, Sicily, with the anglicized version of his birth name — Antonio — and not much else. Sixteen years later his work was in the pocket of nearly every American. That is a steep climb, and he made it with his hands.

He learned sculpting the slow way: as a studio assistant and student to the men who were already shaping America's coins. He trained under James Earle Fraser — the sculptor of the Buffalo nickel — and worked alongside Hermon Atkins MacNeil and Adolph Alexander Weinman, two more of the great medallic artists of the age. By his thirties he was an academician of the National Academy of Design and a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society. He had paid his dues.

Then, in late 1921, the Commission of Fine Arts ran a private contest. The country wanted a coin to mark the end of the Great War — a "peace dollar" to replace the old Morgan dollar. Eight sculptors were invited, several of them de Francisci's former teachers and far more famous than he was. He was the youngest, at 34, and the only one of the group with almost no real coin design behind him. His one prior Mint job — adapting the 1920 Maine commemorative half dollar — was work he later admitted he did "not consider it very favorably."

He won anyway. By his wife's own account he had bet money that he would lose.

The contest gave the artists only about three weeks to deliver finished designs. That deadline is the key to de Francisci's most famous decision. With no time to hire and pose a professional model, he turned to the person already in his studio: his wife, Teresa.

Teresa Cafarelli de Francisci had come to America as a child immigrant herself, from Basilicata in southern Italy. Now she sat for the obverse — the heads side — of the new dollar. De Francisci was always careful to say the result was not a portrait. "The Liberty is not a photograph of Mrs. de Francisci," he explained. "It is a composite face" — one meant, he said, to typify "something of America." But he never hid where it started: "the nose, the fullness of the mouth are much like my wife's, although the whole face has been elongated."

There is a detail he liked to tell that captures how he worked — fast, instinctive, chasing a feeling rather than a likeness. To get Liberty's hair streaming back, he said, "I opened a window of my studio and let the wind blow on her hair while she was posing for me." The radiate crown and the wind-swept hair gave the coin its modern, almost art-deco energy. He said his goal was "to capture the spirit of the country — its intellectual speed, vigor and vitality." Look at the 1921 Liberty next to the staid Morgan dollar it replaced and you can see exactly what he meant.

His style was muscular and high-relief — sculpture forced onto a coin. That ambition created the most famous technical drama of his career, on the reverse (the tails side). De Francisci's eagle perched on a mountain crag, and in his original vision it clutched a broken sword, meant to symbolize disarmament. The public read it differently. A scathing New York Herald editorial declared that "a broken sword carries with it only unpleasant associations" — to a war-weary nation it looked like defeat, not peace. The Mint's chief engraver, George T. Morgan, quietly cut the sword out of the master hub under magnification, extending the olive branch to hide the change. De Francisci defended his idea to the end: "with the sword there is the olive branch of peace and the combination of the two renders it impossible to conceive of the sword as a symbolization of defeat." He lost that argument. The sword was gone before the first coins were struck.

The relief gave him trouble too. The 1921 dollars were struck so deep that the dies couldn't take the pressure and shattered after only a few thousand strikes. De Francisci agreed to flatten his design, and from 1922 the Peace dollar circulated in the lower relief most collectors know. The high-relief 1921 — the version closest to what he actually sculpted — remains the one collectors prize most.