Page - 16 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Introduction16 and the arts. He complemented a brief mention of Jacopo Strada with the tran- scription of a letter by Ottavio Strada to the Duke of Ferrara about his father’s heritage, a letter Tiraboschi had found in the Archivio Estense.23 Naturally in- terest in Strada was strongest in his hometown, Mantua, where brief entries on his career were included in works studying the history of Mantua and revaluat- ing its local cultural heroes.24 More valuable contributions were due to the two first serious students of the Gonzaga archives, Count Carlo d’Arco (1799–1872) and Stefano Davari (1835–1909). Carlo d’Arco’s Delle famiglie mantovani, a com- pendium of historical and genealogical notes on Mantua, included a detailed genealogy of the Strada family. He moreover devoted a brief notice to Jacopo in his Delle arti e degli artefici di Mantova of 1857.25 At about the same time, in his Lettere artistiche inedite, another aristocratic amateur of history and the arts, marchese Giuseppe Campori (1821–1887), published a letter from the Modena archives documenting Strada’s connection with a cadet branch of the Gonzaga.26 Similar research in archival sources uncovered a completely new aspect of Strada’s personality, his religious heterodoxy, presented in passing by the founding genius of the Mantuan State archives as a first-class histori- cal research institution, Stefano Davari, in his chilling notes on the persecu- tions by the Inquisition in Mantua in the second half of the sixteenth century. Davari was also the first to publish and discuss Strada’s description of the Pala- zzo del Te, a prime document for the history and the interpretation of that monument.27 In Austria, Strada’s homeland by adoption, the increasing interest in such primary archival sources, which accompanied new approaches and methods in historiography, was reflected in Johann Evangelist Schlager’s Materialien zur österreichischen Kunstgeschichte, the fifth volume (1850) in the Archiv für Kunde österreichischer Geschichtsquellen, published by the Imperial Academy of Sci- ences. This is a useful but rather unsystematic summing up of facts gleaned from archival and printed sources, covering a period from the mid-sixteenth up to the mid-eighteenth century. Unfortunately references are only sketchily indicated, and the wording is Schlager’s own. Thus his influential statement 23 Tiraboschi 1772–1778, cited from Tiraboschi 1824, pp. 1245–1246. 24 Bettinelli 1774, p. 57 and p. 108; Coddè 1837, pp. 142–143. 25 Annotazioni genealogiche di famiglie mantovane che possono servire alla esatta com- pilazione della storia di queste, s.d., ASMn, Documenti patrii 220, vol. vii, fols. 65–75; it remained in manuscript, but is was accessible to later researchers in Mantua; D’Arco 1857(b), pp. 283; Arco also referred to Strada in his biography of Giulio Romano: Arco 1842, p. xci. 26 Campori 1866, p. 50, letter nr. lxi; cf. Doc. 1568-06-16. 27 önb-hs, Cod. 9039, fols. 154–155; printed in Davari 1889 and Verheyen 1967, pp. 68–69.