Coins Today’s stackable lineup gains a kilo jousting shield, and a bas-relief from Milan Cathedral

South Korean producer, Coin’s Today, has a quite amazing range of stackable silver bullion designs, pushing the concept past limits previously not considered. They’ve done so with an equally wide and eclectic range of subjects, from genres like science, history, and religion. We really must get our Coin Series Profile of the range together in what remains of this year, just to make tracking the range easier for us, and for you.

The concept of stackable bullion is simple enough. The reverse face has a high-relief design struck into it, but instead of a standard obverse, a negative impression of the reverse face is placed there. Therefore, you can interlock one on another – hence, stackable. Coin’s Today usually works with a two-ounce variant as a base design, upscaling to one-kilo in many cases, and recently, down to a half-ounce in some others. All keep the core concept intact, and all exhibit super levels of detail. What we have here are a kilo upgrade, and a new two-ounce.

The kilo version of a previous design is one of our favourites in the shield range. Based around a mid-16th century German jousting shield, it’s a beautiful reproduction of the original, which now resides in the New York Met. You can read all about it in our original article covering the two-ounce debut, back in January of this year.

The kilo version is huge, at 150 mm in height, and almost as wide, which you can see clearly in the image above, where it stands behind the original release. The detail is stunning, right down to the holes in the top left of the shield, also present in the actual 500-year-old item. It’s all quite beautiful, and with a mintage capped at just 333 pieces, much rarer than the two-ounce.

The second release we’re looking at this time, continues this producer’s clever ability to find perfect subjects in the most unlikely of places. Here we have a small part of the relief from one of the doors of Milan Duomo, the iconic cathedral, and one of the cities most beautiful buildings. Those doors are set into a facade, started in the late 16th century, and completely covered with bas-relief artwork.

Describing them would take an article several times the size of this one, but Google Arts & Culture has a superb page covering them, so check that out. The art chosen for the coin is from the cathedral’s main door, completed centuries later in 1906 by sculptor Ludovico Pogliaghi, and is meant to picture the ‘Joy and Sorrow of the Virgin Mary’. There are two focal scenes set into the main doors, and the coin takes the left-hand one, leaving the other for a future coin release, perhaps.

It’s a very intricate scene, filled with Christian biblical imagery, and depicts the Ascension of Jesus. You don’t need me to tell you the mint has done an incredible job reproducing it, and the fact it is also stackable, is very impressive. It’s possible this may see a kilo variant in the future, and that will be quite a feat. Like the other two-ounce stackables in CT’s range, this has an unlimited mintage, and is available now. We’ll try to get a sample to photograph, as the images aren’t the clearest.