Das Ross springt auf die Insel: Zur Entstehung, Verbreitung und Wirkung der bekanntesten Medaille auf die hannoversche Sukzession.

To celebrate the Hanoverian succession to the British throne and the coronation of Goerge I, several official medals were minted both in London and in Hanover. Even larger, however, was the number of medals produced by entrepreneur medallists to satisfy the burgeoning collectors' market. Johann Caspar Lauffer of Nuremberg went so far as to publish a set of three (all cut by Georg Wilhelm Vestner), and these proved to be not only the most influential, but, on close analysis, by far the most inventive. The most famous of them all, showing the Hanoverian horse leaping across the Channel, indeed prompted a Jacobite medallic reaction a few years later.
The article argues that Nuremberg protestant theologist Joachim Negelein came up with the "inventio" for each of these medals, and analyses the intricate and sophisticated interplay of image and inscription, their sources, meaning and connotations. The leaping horse medal in particualr proves to be far more than a memorable image; it is indeed a veritable anti-catholic political pamphlet, revealing layers of meaning to be enjoyed by the connoisseur collector. Negelein adapted a quote from Vergil that evokes the image of Britain as the Fortunate Isles, now joined with the rest of the protestant world through the Hanoverian succession. And he adds sting to this argument by using a quote from Juvenal favoured by catholic Habsburg, which he now turns on its head by cleverly linking it in with several pictorial traditions, both numismatic and heraldic.