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

Acknowledgements History is a collective effort. Though working on a project such as this some- times seems a lonely quest, very often exchanges of references, snippets of in- formation, hunches, ideas, full-fledged theories, fill the desert one is traversing with freshly sparkling waters. This study owes much to the many publications I have been able to consult in the course of my research—many of which can be found in the bibliography—and specific insights I have found there I have as much as possible acknowledged in the footnotes. Here I only wish to men- tion the late Renate von Busch, author of the first sustained investigation into Strada’s career, in her exemplary Studien zu deutschen Antikensammlungen des 16. Jahrhunderts of 1973. I have worked so long on this project, off and on, that over the years I have been able to discuss aspects of it with many, many colleagues, whose infor- mation, insights and ideas all in some way contributed to its development; so many in fact, that I must limit myself to mentioning by name only those to whom I owe the most. First among these are Willemijn Fock, who first intro- duced me to Jacopo Strada; Jan van Dorsten, whose untimely death in 1985 deprived me of a very interested and stimulating critic, who has in many ways contributed to the development of my ideas; and Anton Boschloo, who has su- pervised my research both from near by and from far away over many years: it is a great sadness to me that he is not there anymore to see the result at last. At the European University Institute in Florence, where I began the project, it has been supervised by Denys Hay and Anthony Pagden; Robert Evans was a gener- ous and hospitable exterior supervisor from Oxford. Gigliola Fragnito gave me many hints and had me invited to give my first conference paper at the confer- ence of Europa delle Corti convened by Cesare Mozzarelli in Urbino in 1985. I gratefully acknowledge similar invitations by André Chastel, Manfredo Tafuri, Clifford Malcolm Brown, Eliška Fučíková, Hubertus Günther, Michael Craw- ford and, more recently, Duncan Bull, Ivan Prokop Muchka and John Cunnally. Debora Meijers, Mieke Reinders and Madelon Simons, editors of the handbook on the history of collecting of the Open Universiteit, provided an important stimulus in that field, as did Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson. Thanks to a Frances Yates Fellowship I could for some time work in the Census of Works of Art Known in the Renaissance, at the time still located at the Warburg Institute: Ruth Rubinstein was a kind and very generous guide to this particular field, both there and in Florence. My research into the Neugebäude was greatly fa- cilitated by Hilda Lietzmann’s monograph, and I owe much to her as a sparring