Peace Shines Through Gold: The Vatican Honored at the COTY 2025
The Vatican Mint proudly celebrates an important international recognition: the 50-euro gold coin “War and Peace,” minted in 2024, has won the Best Gold Coin award at the 2025 COTY (Coin of the Year) Awards, announced on August 21 during the World’s Fair of Money in Oklahoma City, USA.
This success honours not only technical and artistic excellence, but also the strength of the universal message conveyed by the coin: the contrast between war and peace, rendered with great sensitivity by artist Chiara Principe, who has been collaborating with the Vatican since 2013 in the creation of coins and stamps on a wide variety of themes, always with outstanding results.
The coin is the result of an artistic and technical choice with extraordinary emotional impact. The dualism between war and peace is represented by a vertical split dividing the composition into two opposing, yet interconnected scenes.
On the left side: war, depicted in incuse through the matte finish of satin gold.
On the right: peace, emerging in relief and enhanced by a polished, glossy finish.
On the left, we see the hollow silhouette of a soldier, a man emptied by the horrors of war. Behind him, smoke from explosions envelops a desolate landscape, while barbed wire seems to imprison the world.
On the right side, that same barbed wire gradually transforms into an olive branch. The figure of the man is now full, solid, no longer alone, but accompanied by a little girl holding a flower, standing before a landscape of life, hope, and future.
The artist explains:
"Starting with the idea of dividing the coin vertically into two sections on both sides to represent the contrast between war and peace, the entire composition gradually developed, revolving mainly around the different iconographic and sculptural elements embodied by the two halves."
One example is the figure of the soldier:
"On the left side, representing war, the man is formed by a hollow shape, corresponding to level zero of the coin, and is visible only thanks to the raised background of the sky surrounding and defining him."
This formal choice is tied to a clear symbolic and structural intention.
"This interplay of negative and positive planes is highly symbolic," Principe emphasizes, "but it also contributes to the perfect compositional balance of the design, and was the result of a careful and lengthy design process."
A harmonious composition, therefore, in which form and meaning are inextricably intertwined, where peace is not only represented, but invoked and built through every detail.
This visual and conceptual transition, from war to peace, from desolation to rebirth, is the narrative core of the work. A powerful image that needs no words to pose a fundamental question to the viewer:
Which side do you choose?
Chiara Principe’s work transcends the boundaries of traditional numismatic design, uniting art, symbolism, and faith.
The international jury recognized in this coin a remarkable example of how numismatics can serve as a vehicle for culture and a message of peace, one that is both urgent and deeply needed in our time.
