Page - 11 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

11The Image—Or from Whom (Not?) to Buy a Second-Hand Car Jacopo and Ottavio’s numismatic drawings: ‘I went through the incomparable drawings of I. Strada, which one cannot see without becoming both more in- quisitive and more learned’.12 Patin’s guide was Peter Lambeck, the Imperial librarian [Fig. 0.8], whose interest in the Strada manuscripts may have been stimulated by Patin’s en- thusiasm. Indirectly this interest was influenced by the Emperor himself: in- trigued by the gift of a copy of Patin’s new Paris edition of Fulvio Orsini and Antonio Agustín’s De familiis Romanis, which was largely based on numismatic evidence, Leopold asked Lambeck to inspect the Imperial coin collection. The result of this was that numismatic material looms large in the huge volumes Lambeck dedicated to the history and holdings of the Imperial Library, his Commentariorum de augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarea Vindobonensi, the first volume of which was published in 1665. Chief among the works described were ‘two volumes of manuscript in folio of the greatest value <…> exclusively dedicated to the Consular coins, drawn with incredible study and elegance from the originals, and that were presented to Emperor Ferdinand i by the most famous Imperial antiquary, Jacopo Strada from Mantua’.13 Lambeck not merely praised the detailed drawings contained in these volumes, but repeatedly referred to them in his learned arguments and also included several large engravings directly derived from them.14 The first of these is a consular coin and its reverse attributed to C. Petilius [Fig. 0.10]: in his comment on this coin Lambeck gives a brief survey of all of Strada’s numismatic manuscripts among the Vienna holdings. Elsewhere he illustrates a coin attributed to P. Papirius Carbonus and a coin of Livia with engravings derived from Strada’s drawings, and uses other ones to discuss the place of the cult of Vesta in Roman Antiquity. Most interesting is his use of Strada’s drawing of a Hadrianic coin dedicated to Antinous [Fig. 0.11] and of Strada’s description of it, which he transcribed in extenso, in an attempt to interpret the most important antique find in the 12 Patin 1674, p. 226: ‘J’y parcourus ces desseins incomparables de I. Strada, qu’on ne peut voir sans devenir et plus curieux et plus savant’; ibidem, p. 12: ‘I’en vis aussi d’Octavius Strada en matiere de Médailles, avec une infinité de desseins de Raphaël, de Rubens, d’Albert, Durer et d’autres excellens Maîtres’. Elsewhere [Patin 1695, pp. 201–203] he refers to the printed numismatic works of Jacopo—‘dont la lecture est absolument necessaire aux Historiens et aux Curieux’—and to those of Ottavio Strada, Jacopo’s second son and successor, which were largely based on the researches of his father. Though Patin com- mended these works, he warned the reader that they contained ‘un grand nombre de fausses particularitez, qu’il ne se faut pas engager à le croire sans beaucoup de discrétion’. 13 Lambeck 1665–1679, i, pp. 74–75. 14 Lambeck 1665–1679, i, pp. 76–78; i, p. 84; ii (1669), p. 524; p. 739 (and accompanying engravings).