Apollonio Menabeni (ca. 1540–ca. 1603)

Apollonio Menabeni was a Milanese philosopher, poet, and physician to the King of Sweden. He wrote Tractatus de magno animali . . . in 1581 for the emperor Rudolf II. The reverse of this medal commemorates Menabeni's work as a doctor and naturalist with an illustration of a scene from the fifth book of Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights. It tells the story of Apion, who claimed to have witnessed the tribulations of the Roman slave Androcles, who escaped to a cave to discover it was the home of a wounded lion. Androcles removed the large thorn from the lion's paw and in return received a lion's loyalty. The depiction is reminiscent of scenes from the life of St. Jerome, which were popular at the time of the German Renaissance. Abondio was one of the few medalists to successfully marry the styles of Italian and German Renaissance art.

Source: Scher, Stephen K., et al. The Scher Collection of Commemorative Medals. New York and London, 2019.