Marcel Jovine

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

He was born Marcello Iovine on 26 July 1921 in Castellammare di Stabia, on the bay near Naples, and trained at the Italian military academy, where he picked 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 camp in Pennsylvania — and kept drawing. Collectors tell a story, repeated in his obituaries, that he met his future wife, Angela, when she came to play piano for the prisoners.

He was repatriated to Italy in 1946, then returned to the United States in 1950 to marry her and stay, becoming a naturalized citizen and Americanizing "Marcello Iovine" to Marcel Jovine. He settled in Closter, New Jersey, 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 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 became a classroom and hobby-shop staple after 1960. He followed them with a Visible Ford Model T. An earlier hit, the Blessed Event baby doll, reportedly earned a million dollars in its first year. The toys paid the bills. Sculpture was the work he kept circling back to.

In the 1960s and '70s Jovine turned seriously to medallic sculpture — the art of carving in shallow relief for an object 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 from a single hardened-steel die (the tool that stamps the design). Get the relief — how high the design stands off the flat field — even slightly wrong, and the press can't fill it.

He learned the discipline on art medals long before he touched a coin. His first commission, in 1964, was for his adopted hometown. From there he became astonishingly prolific: by his own count he produced something like 200 medals and coins, working in fourteen medallic series for the Medallic Art Company and others — Lindbergh, the zodiac, calendar medals, a wildlife set. He is the only artist to design three issues of the Society of Medalists, the most prestigious commission in American art-medal work (1976, 1980, and 1990). In 1983 he modeled the American Numismatic Society's 125th-anniversary medal, a piece sometimes called one of the finest American medals of the twentieth century.

The honors followed: the National Sculpture Society's Lindsey Morris Prize for best bas-relief in 1977, the ANS's J. Sanford Saltus Medal — the top award in medallic art — in 1984, and two terms as president of the National Sculpture Society from 1988.

His coin work has a recognizable instinct: bold, legible, emblem-forward. A single stylized eagle. A lone quill pen standing upright. He liked one strong image carrying the whole face, rather than a crowded scene.

When Congress revived the US commemorative-coin program in the 1980s, the Mint opened its biggest projects to outside artists. Jovine kept winning. He took six Mint design competitions in all, including the last three Olympic coins of his era.

His clearest statement is the 1987 Constitution Bicentennial five-dollar gold coin. Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III picked Jovine's design out of a field of eleven outside artists and six Mint sculptors — and it is the only US coin where Jovine designed both sides. The obverse (the "heads" side) shows a sharply modern, stylized eagle gripping a quill pen. The reverse turns that quill upright over the words We the People, in script, from the Constitution's own opening line. It is the act of signing a constitution compressed into two small gold faces, and that year it won a Coin of the Year award for historical significance.

But the relationship soured. Jovine's biographers describe the Mint treating him "in progressively shabby manner": the 1987 design was struck as he drew it, but later submissions came back increasingly reworked by staff engravers. By the 2001 Capitol Visitor Center half dollar, his reverse had been merged with another artist's work — and Jovine, by some accounts, was done taking Mint commissions. It is a quietly bitter coda for an immigrant who had out-designed the Mint's own staff six times over.