Page - XV - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Preface The research for this book, and formulating its results, have taken a very long time. At least in part this was caused by the manifold activities undertaken by its protagonist, the Renaissance antiquary Jacopo Strada. Though sometimes described as such, he was hardly the prototype of the Renaissance ‘universal man’: he appears to have had little interest in literature as an art, no interest in music, hardly any interest in anything pertaining to the natural world. His central passion was the history and the culture of the ancient world—in par- ticular its visual culture—and its application to the artistic endeavour of his own time. But he did pursue this passion in many different ways: as an artist, a designer, an architect; as an antiquary, a scholar and encyclopaedic writer; as a publisher and bookseller; as a collector of, and dealer in antiquities and contemporary works of art; as an agent and a scholarly and artistic advisor of powerful patrons; and—last but not least—as a courtier. Moreover he en- gaged in all or most of these activities in several parts of Europe: in Italy, in Central and Southern Germany, in Lyon, and finally at the Imperial court, in Austria and Bohemia. As a consequence of this, his career has only been stud- ied piecemeal: certain aspect of his activities—such as his connection with Ti- tian, whose portrait of Strada remains his chief claim to fame, his numismatic studies, or his role in the creation of the Antiquarium of the Munich Residenz and the Munich collection of antiquities—have received the attention of local historians or scholars engaged in specific sub-disciplines of history and art his- tory. From the beginning, my purpose has been to bring together these various strands into what I hoped and intended to be a consistent whole; but how to do this was not easy to decide, one of the obvious reasons being that one can- not be a specialist in all the various fields in which Strada has left some mark. In fact the book as it now appears is the result of a process of organic growth, rather than of meticulous architectural planning. But since that may reflect Strada’s own career, this may be less of a disadvantage than might appear at first sight. The book is intended as an empirical study into Strada’s life and activities: his career is of sufficient interest, and touches so many different cultural en- vironments, that finding and presenting an ample quantity of biographical in- formation seemed indispensable to understand its development. Though as an artist and as an intellectual Strada is of some interest, certainly he does not count among the great artists of the sixteenth century, and his intellectual endeavour is to a large extent reproductive, rather than creative. He concen- trated on collecting and disseminating information he thought could be of use, and to propagate the ideas and ‘inventions’ of others he admired. His careful