The world’s most reproduced work of art lies in gutters everywhere: Victor David Brenner’s portrait of President Lincoln, stamped on each 1-cent piece. First issued in 1909 after President Roosevelt forced it on the U.S. Mint, it is America’s oldest circulating coin design.

After nearly 230 years’ independence, Americans still use the Briticism penny when referring to the cent. The term stems from the denarius, a Roman silver piece first struck in the third century B.C.E. According to Matthew 22:19 and Mark 12:15, one was handed to Jesus of Nazareth when he was asked whether paying taxes to Caesar was lawful. The emperors gradually debased the coin by alloying the silver with ever-larger portions of copper until it became silverless. After the empire’s fall, British kings continued striking copper denarii, which invading Angles and Saxons called “penning” or “pfennig.”

Long after independence, Americans continued using British money, including the penny, until Thomas Jefferson successfully argued for adopting the dollar (divided into 100 cents). Yet, when the first copper cents appeared in 1793, the public insisted on calling them pennies. These coins bore images either of Liberty or of a flying eagle – for portraying a person on American currency was then considered repugnant as monarchical.

In 1905, Roosevelt dined with sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The president, insisting that America could have coins as beautiful as those of the ancient Greeks, challenged the artist: If Saint-Gaudens would design them, Roosevelt would mint them. Their triumph is St. Gaudens’s $20 gold piece, struck between 1907 and 1933. On the obverse, a strong, voluptuous Liberty strides toward the viewer, holding aloft in her right hand the torch of Enlightenment and in her left the olive branch of peace. On the reverse, an eagle soars above a sun in splendor.

Saint-Gaudens died before designing any other coins. So Roosevelt found Brenner. Born in 1871 in Lithuania, he had learned engraving and jewelry-making from his father, who also saw to Victor’s instruction in history, languages, and the Talmud. He immigrated to New York in 1890, where he worked as a die-cutter while attending Cooper Union, the Art Students League, and the National Academy of Design. His work won a bronze medal at the 1900 World’s Fair. In 1908, the Panama Canal Commission hired him to create a medal that would bear Roosevelt’s profile. While the president was posing at Brenner’s studio, he admired the plaster patterns – rough drafts, in effect – of a plaque Brenner was creating for Lincoln’s centennial in 1909, and the artist was invited to design a new cent.

Law restricted his options. The cent must be 19 millimeters in diameter, weigh 3.11 grams, and struck on bronze planchets – blank discs of copper alloyed with tin. The design must include the words “Liberty,” “In God We Trust,” “E Pluribus Unum,” and “The United States of America”; and the denomination, “One Cent,” plus the date and mint mark. Less specifically, his design must be easy to strike and longwearing in circulation.

The Lincoln cent’s obverse is borrowed from the bust on Brenner’s centennial plaque. The difference is in its relief: The relationship of the coin’s features to its field, the flat surface of the coin. Coins in high relief wear out quickly in circulation. Brenner’s cent has a much lower relief than his plaque, sacrificing some depth and detail to extend its circulating life. The reverse is a masterpiece of late Art Nouveau, with the words rendered in a slender Gothic font inspired by the Vienna Secession and two stylized ears of durum wheat enwreathing the denomination. At the bottom, Brenner placed his initials, V.D.B.

He created plaster models, 12 inches in diameter, of the obverse and reverse. Once approved, the models were copper-plated and placed on a reduction lathe. This machine transferred the details in miniature into a soft steel blank, the master hub, which was heat treated or annealed to harden it and then used to make dies from which coins were struck.

Crowds swarmed the Wall Street Sub treasury to buy the new cents when they were released on August 2, 1909. Three days later, however, coin production was suspended due to media controversy over the size of Brenner’s initials. The Mint’s chief engraver, Charles Barber, who disdained Brenner as both a nonbureaucrat and Jew, gleefully ground the initials from the master dies (they reappeared on the truncation of Lincoln’s bust in 1918, after Barber’s death). The Mint’s mediocrities again tampered with the coin in 1959 when, to commemorate Lincoln’s sesquicentennial, they replaced Brenner’s elegant reverse with a rendition of the Lincoln Memorial resembling nothing so much as an old trolley car.