102984 | GREAT BRITAIN. "Vellinger" cast bronze Medal.

102984  |  GREAT BRITAIN. "Vellinger" cast bronze Medal. Issued 1994 (93mm, 541.7 g). By Tom Phillips for the British Art Medal Society, and cast by Lunts Castings in Birmingham.

 

Stylized calligraphy from a cave interior // Gleaming discs revealing the contents of the cave; please see the artist's comments below for deeper insight into this medal's design and meaning. Edge: Plain.

 

The Medal 26 (Spring 1995), pp. 155-156; Attwood 106 & p. 17; Silich II, 758. As Made. Deep brown surfaces, with some lighter brown highlights. From an output of 61 pieces.

 

The workup in the Spring 1994 issue of The Medal offers this about the artist and his BAMS medal: "Tom Phillips, RA, is one of Britain's leading painters, and is also active as a writer and composer. Born in 1937, he studied at St. Catherine's Oxford and Camberwell School of Art, first exhibiting in the 1964 Young contemporaries. Since then he has shown widely and has worked in most major modern art museums in the world. Most recently his retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy toured to America. Phillips is almost best known as a maker of books, most notably A Humument (Thames & Hudson), which is already in its third edition, and his own illustrated translation of Dante's Inferno, which he produced as a limited edition livre de luxe and is now published as a trade hardback. Also published by Thames & Hudson is his massive catalogue Works and Texts 1992, which covers the extraordinary range of his activities. His opera Irma is frequently performed and has been recorded, and as co-director of A TV Dante he won the Italia Prize. He lives and works in London. The artist has sent the following commentary on his Vellinger Medal. This bronze is an artefact made to bring into the world of reality an object from the world of fiction. In H. W. K. Collam's eccentric novel Unhaunted Comma (1943) the hero Vellinger seduces the beautiful Rima with his mansion of treasures and dazzles her with his wealth and sophistication. Rima falls in love, however, with Fritz, a member of Vellinger's resident string quartet. Together on an illicit outing they have found an ancient cave nearby, whose walls are covered with gigantic and powerful calligraphy and in whose second chamber they come across an abandoned game with arcane pieces. Rima decides to tell Vellinger of their discovery and of their love... 'But there was one thing you did not see,' said Vellinger. 'It was the only thing that I removed. Rima, will you look in the top drawer of that cabinet?' Rima went to the chest he had indicated and slid out the topmost of the thin drawers. A row of dark but gleaming discs looked up at her, each in its fitted recess of green baize. Four of them were like giant coins with heads in high relief encircled by Latin inscriptions. In the centre was a fifth, larger than the others and covered in a taut calligraphy that matched that of the cave walls. 'Pick it up, look at the other side.' She cased the heavy disc from its baize nest and turned it over in her hands. The reverse was ridged with a maze of less formal marks which reminded her of an archaeological site she had once seen from the air with walls and roofless spaces, amidst a pattern of parallel trenches. 'It is my greatest treasure. Everything else I left as it was, which is why you thought it your discovery. I call the game that you saw the game of silence. The medal I think is the key to all the things that are there, in two visual languages we will never understand. Having already reconstructed the mural as a large drawing two years ago, I immediately thought, when invited to design a medal, to try and recapture the spirit of this description in bronze."

 

Upload: 2 September 2025.

 

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