Carmen Arnold-Biucchi, Damarete Curator of Ancient Coins at the Harvard Art Museums and lecturer in Harvard’s Department of the Classics, passed away peacefully on Jan. 2.
Arnold-Biucchi is remembered as a warm person with a joyful streak, always ready to support her colleagues and students and to celebrate achievements and milestones. An enthusiastic educator on ancient coins and their importance in history, Arnold-Biucchi began her career at Harvard in 2002 as the curator of numismatic collections at the Harvard Art Museums and became the inaugural Damarete Curator of Ancient Coins, a position endowed in 2009. Among her main areas of interest were the coinages of ancient Sicily, which are alluded to in the position’s name. (Damarete, wife of tyrant Gelon of Syracuse in Sicily, helped bring about peace after the Syracusan victory over the Carthaginians in 480 B.C. The first Damareteion, a decadrachm or ten-drachma coin, reportedly was struck from the crown she was awarded by the grateful Carthaginians). Arnold-Biucchi taught numerous seminars for undergraduates and graduates in the Department of the Classics and dedicated time to training graduate student assistants and interns. She retired from the University in July 2019.
As Harvard’s first coin curator, Arnold-Biucchi carried out the foundational work of arranging the museums’ distinguished collection of more than 20,000 mostly Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins by mints and emperors, and improved the cataloguing of the coins in the museums’ database. Arnold-Biucchi also made roughly 2,000 acquisitions to broaden the range of the collection and organized thematic coin displays throughout the museums’ galleries. Her publications include Alexander’s Coins and Alexander’s Image (2006) and Sculpture and Coins: Margarete Bieber as Scholar and Collector (2019), and she also authored the museums’ first comprehensive digital guide to its ancient coins.
Originally from Ticino, in south Switzerland, Arnold-Biucchi studied classical archaeology and ancient history at the University of Fribourg. She initially worked at the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC) and then, for almost two decades, at the American Numismatic Society in New York City, where she became the first Margaret Thompson curator of Greek coins and also taught. Among her numerous appointments, she spent a year as the J. Clawson Mills Art History Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2001–02), and was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford and the Sorbonne. From 2009 to 2015, she served as president of the International Numismatic Council. She was awarded the Gunnar Holst Numismatic Foundation Medal in Göteborg in 2012, the Jeton de Vermeil of the French Numismatic Society in 2014, and in 2022, the Medal of the Royal Numismatic Society, UK.
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