Page - 19 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

19The Image—Or from Whom (Not?) to Buy a Second-Hand Car discussed only in as far as they are relevant for the main topic of the specific publication. 0.6 Kulturgeschichte before World War ii This is even true of the one article of which Strada himself—or rather his portrait—is the principal theme, ‘Zur richtigen Datirung eines Portraits von Tizian’ of 1901 by Heinrich Zimmermann, a historian and archivist who ear- lier had contributed to the source publications in the Jahrbuch der kunsthis- torischen Sammlungen. In this thoughtful re-examination of Stockbauer’s sources (the originals of which had been sent to Vienna for him to consult) in the light of other archival material that had meanwhile become available or he had found himself in the Vienna archives, Zimmermann carefully reconstructs Strada’s travels to Venice on behalf of Duke Albrecht v of Bavaria, but only with the aim of assigning as precise as possible a date to the Vienna portrait. This was not because of any lack of interest in Strada as such: on the contrary, Zimmermann limited himself here to the problem in hand, because he in- tended to publish a full biography of Strada, whom he deemed to be of great interest ‘for the history of the collections dating from the Renaissance period in Austria and Bavaria’. In a footnote he cautions that all biographical notices on Strada published by that time contain more or less glaring and often mis- leading mistakes.33 Zimmermann never seems to have published any more of the material he had collected for his planned monograph, which never ap- peared. His research was not taken up by other Austrian scholars: only in his Geschichte der Sammlungen, part of a Festschrift intended to celebrate the fif- tieth anniversary of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but published only at the end of the Second World War, did Alphons Lhotsky pay some attention to the role Strada had played at the Imperial court. His is a succinct and substantially correct, though incomplete summing up of available literature and published sources.34 33 Zimmermann 1901; p. 835, n.1: Da ich seit Jahren an einer eingehenden Biographie dieses für die Geschichte der aus der Renaissancezeit stammenden Sammlungen in Oesterreich und Bayern sehr interessanten Mannes arbeite und sie in nicht allzu ferner Zeit, mit allen documentarischen Nachweisen versehen, zu veröffentlichen gedenke, kann ich mich hier auf die Anführung der für unsern Zweck nöthigsten Daten und die Bemerkung beschrän- ken, dass alle bisher über ihn veröffentlichten biographischen Angaben an mehr oder weniger groben, zuweilen irreführenden Unrichtigkeiten kranken, die zu widerlegen, ich jener grösseren Arbeit vorbehalten muss <…>’. 34 Lhotsky 1945, pp. 160–163; it appears unlikely that Lhotsky used Zimmermann’s unpub- lished material.