Page - 28 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Introduction28 0.9.3 Contemporary Scholarship: Architecture Some other components of Strada’s huge collection of drawings have likewise been the subject of detailed study. Principal among these are what the Ameri- can scholar William Bell Dinsmoor in a ground breaking article in the Art Bul- letin of 1942 termed ‘the literary remains of Sebastiano Serlio’. Speculations as to the quantity and character of the material Strada obtained and his project to print the as yet unpublished books of Serlio’s architectural treatise have since been exhaustively treated. This was first done in 1966 by Marco Rosci in his edition of the Munich manuscript of the Sesto Libro of Serlio’s architectural treatise, then by Myra Nan Rosenfeld in her important article on Serlio’s manu- script of the Settimo Libro in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna and in her edition of the Columbia University manuscript of the Sesto Libro. The Serlio conference at Vicenza in 1989 provided the present author with an opportunity to present and discuss the results of a detailed examination of the documents. Finally Francesco Paolo Fiore and Tancredi Carrunchio summed up the state of the question in the introduction to Architettura civile, their edi- tion of the Vienna and Munich manuscripts of the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Books of Serlio’s treatise of 1994.57 These new findings were also discussed in Sebastiano Serlio: Architecture et Imprimerie, the publication edited by Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa presenting the results of an international research project centred around an exhibition and a conference on this theme in 1998. Sabine Frommel’s important monograph on Serlio, concentrating on the work of the architect itself rather than on the publishing history of his writings, refers to Strada only when relevant and in passing.58 Of equal interest for the history of sixteenth-century architecture are the detailed drawings of the facades and the complete decoration of the Palazzo del Te in Mantua that Strada commissioned in 1567. These were known to have existed from the sources, and they were already referred to in Hartig’s history of the foundation of the Munich library survey by Duke Albrecht v, for whom this documentation was made, and in Elizabeth Herget’s article on the influ- ence of the Palazzo del Te on the architecture north of the Alps during the later sixteenth century.59 The drawings themselves, which were preserved in the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf with an old attribution to Santi Bartoli, were only identified later in the 1960s by Egon Verheyen, who dedicated a long article to them. On the basis of their obvious connection with Strada’s manuscript 57 Dinsmoor 1942; Rosci/Brizio 1966, Rosenfeld 1974; Rosenfeld 1978; Jansen 1989; Fiore/ Carrunchio 1994. 58 Sebastiano Serlio A Lyon, 2004; Frommel 1998. 59 Hartig 1917, pp. 52–53; Herget 1963, pp. 288–289.