Maximilian Dasio

He spent the first half of his working life as a painter, and the second half proving that a painter could beat the professionals at their own trade.

Maximilian Dasio was born in Munich on 28 February 1865 and trained at the city's Academy of Fine Arts. From 1891 he worked for himself — painting, drawing, and running a small private school for graphic and applied art. He taught at the Munich women artists' academy from 1896 to 1901, and in 1902 he was made a professor at the royal school of applied arts. On paper that is a respectable Munich art career, and it could easily have been the whole story.

Then, at around forty, he picked up a graver and started cutting coins.

That is an odd age to begin. Die-cutting is a physical craft with a long apprenticeship: you are carving a design into hardened steel, in reverse, at a size smaller than a bottle cap, with no way to undo a slip. Dasio was largely self-taught at it and went on to make roughly 200 medals. German reference works count him among the handful of artists — with Rudolf Bosselt, Georg Roemer and Benno Elkan — who dragged German medal art out of its late-nineteenth-century slump. He won a gold medal at the Brussels world's fair for his work.

What makes his life genuinely strange is what he did alongside it. In 1910 he entered the Bavarian civil service as a Regierungs- und Studienrat, and by 1920 he had risen to Ministerialrat — a senior official in the Bavarian ministry for education and culture, where he worked with the school reformer Georg Kerschensteiner on how drawing should be taught. So the man who designed some of the Weimar Republic's best-known silver was, in his day job, a ministry bureaucrat. He also taught: Gabriele Münter, later a central figure of the Blue Rider group, was among his students, as were the sculptor Ludwig Gies and the poster artist Hans Rudi Erdt.

He kept working past all of it — a 1919 portfolio of twenty woodcut variations on the devil, religious and folkloric print series, paintings now in Munich collections and graphic work in Vienna's Albertina. He died in Oberammergau on 17 August 1954, aged 89.

By 1900 nearly every coin and medal in Europe was made the same way. The artist sculpted a large plaster model, and a reducing machine — a mechanical pantograph — traced that model and cut a shrunken copy into steel. It is accurate, repeatable, and it does the hard part for you.

Dasio rejected it. He went back to what German writers call the handcraft of the old coins: cutting the design directly into the die — the hardened steel stamp that presses the image into a metal blank — working in negative and positive by hand. He cut into steel, into slate, into several kinds of wood. That choice is the whole signature. A hand-cut die has small irregularities a machine would never produce; the lines carry the pressure of the hand that made them.

His models were old too. He looked to late-Gothic and early-Renaissance portrait medals, and cast his portraits in that manner rather than in the smooth academic style of his contemporaries. On coins he signed simply D.

Then came the commission that outlived everything else. In 1927 the Republic finally settled the design of its five-mark piece, its largest circulating silver coin, and Dasio's oak tree took the reverse — the tails side — while Josef Wackerle's Reich eagle took the other. The oak is the oldest German shorthand for endurance, and Dasio drew his from a specific tree, a very old oak at Kellenhusen in Schleswig-Holstein.

Look into the crown of leaves and you find branches with nothing growing on them. German sources report that Dasio confirmed what people had suspected from the start: the dead limbs stood for the territory Germany lost under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. It is a remarkable thing to have got past a state mint — a political argument, unstated in any legend, struck into roughly 148 million coins and handed to the public as change. (The popular lists matching each withered branch to a named province are collector folklore layered on afterwards; the branches are on the coin, the one-to-one reading is not.)

The Republic used him repeatedly for its commemoratives, and the results are unusually varied for one hand: a three-masted ship snapping a chain for Bremerhaven's centenary in 1927, King Henry I and his queen Mathilde seated under an arch for Nordhausen's thousandth year, and in 1931 a Magdeburg piece marking three hundred years since the city was sacked and burned in the Thirty Years' War. Ships, medieval rulers, a city that survived the worst — each solved as its own problem, none of them a house style repeated.