Page - 15 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

15The Image—Or from Whom (Not?) to Buy a Second-Hand Car slowly shifted from the merely bibliographical to the summarily biographical. Their authors began to include details about Strada’s life taken from an obvi- ous source that had always been available, but had rarely or never been used: the prefaces and dedications of the books he had published.21 Thus the entry on Strada in the Biografia Universale of 1829 contains the characteristic phrase: ‘He also gave the example of trading in works of art and of enriching strangers at the expense of Italy’, which the slightly later Nouvelle biographie générale renders as ‘It was on behalf of Germany that he despoiled Italy <…>’. Both pas- sages closely echo Strada’s own account of his acquisition of large quantities of antiquities in Venice, on behalf of Hans Jakob Fugger and Duke Albrecht v of Bavaria, ‘which I myself, with great effort and at great expense, divesting Italy of its most noble spoils, had brought to Augsburg’. In the otherwise identical Italian version of the dictionary, Domenico de Angelis, the (Italian) author of this entry, takes Strada sternly to task for this unpatriotic behaviour: ‘He also gave the example, fatal to his fatherland, of trading <‘traficare’> in works of the fine arts, thus enriching the foreigners to the injury of his Italy’.22 Is this ominous word ‘traficare’ the first intimation of Pope-Hennessy’s abject, com- mercial ‘dealer in antiques’? 0.5 Quellenkunde: Some Sources Published in the Nineteenth Century Only in the nineteenth century, when the growing interest in regional and na- tional history and culture caused local authors and antiquaries to delve deeper into the holdings of their libraries and to explore the local archives, further new source material on Strada was unearthed and published. The first instance is provided by the prince of eighteenth-century Italian erudites, Girolamo Tiraboschi, whose Storia della letteratura Italiana of 1772–1778, a prime exam- ple of cultural history in the wider sense, foreshadows the Romantic interest in the contribution of the individual intellectual, artist or patron to literature 21 In particular his Epitome thesauri antiquitatum, Lyon 1553, which had been reprinted sev- eral times and could easily be found, and his editions of Caesar and of Serlio’s Settimo Libro, both printed at Frankfurt in 1575. 22 Biographie universelle s.a.: ‘Il donna aussi l’example de trafiquer des objets d’art et d’enrichir les étrangers aux dépens de l’Italie’; Nouvelle Biographie generale 1855: ‘Ce fût au profit d’Allemagne qu’il dépouilla l’Italie <…>”; Caesar 1575, p.*4: “quae ego magna vi pecuniarum expensa Augustam, nobilissimis spoliis exuta Italia, advexi”; Biografia uni- versale 1829: “Ei diede pure l’esempio funesto al paese di lui di trafficare di oggetti di belle arti, arrichendo così gli stranieri con danno della sua Italia’.