The medal in the modern sense of the term is an artistic creation of the Italian Renaissance: one of the most simple and delightful original works of art and culture, designed to celebrate or commemorate figures or events, whether important or little known. The medal is a synthesis of sophisticated culture, given its recourse to symbolic, allegorical and mythological figures, illustrating in fairly limited space stories and events that are sometimes complex, and given the use of Latin in the pithy and succinct inscriptions. The medal is also an extremely important historical document because of its celebratory and commemorative functions, able to transmit images, faces, names, dates and information about people and events in different centuries in all sorts of different styles. The Popes were well aware of the significance and properties of the medal, of which they made great use from the XVI century on, to celebrate and rescue from oblivion the most important events of their Pontificate. And so it is that today the papal medals make up a continual series without equals among the medals that have been stamped in various periods by the great figures, dynasties and institutions of every country. They are of enormous importance, both historical and artistic: they document almost five and a half centuries of the history of the Church.