The art of money.

This article offers reasons to support the contention that those who do not regard coin design as an art form have probably not spent much time recently at the auction house Sotheby's Holdings Inc., where two of the world's great coin collections have come on to the market. The first, sold in 1990, was the collection amassed by Nelson Bunker Hunt, a rich Texan who has been a bulk buyer of silver as well as of old coins. The second, being sold in a series of auctions at Sotheby's, is the Athena I and Athena II collection, formed by an investment fund founded by Numismatic Fine Arts International, a coin dealer based in Los Angeles which, partly as a joint venture with Merrill Lynch, a Wall Street investment bank, managed a portfolio of $32m invested in the coins of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Although the Roman coins in the Athena collection are handsome, it is the coins of Ancient Greece that take one's breath away.