Page - 32 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Introduction32 Albrecht v’s collection and of the Antiquarium built to house it. Accurate criti- cal reading of the many sources she consulted—including the Libri antiqui- tatum of the Bavarian State Archive mentioned above—led to the discovery of Strada’s central role. His importance in this respect incited Von Busch to add the excursus in which she gave an ample and detailed survey of Strada’s career. She is the first since Titian who, by judicious selection and ample cita- tion of her sources, manages to evoke Jacopo Strada as an actual human being, with all his enthusiasms, his little vanities, and his obstinacy. She is also the first who implicitly seems to detect some coherence in Strada’s very diverse oc- cupations. Of particular moment are her appreciation of Strada’s long-lasting and intimate relationship with Hans Jakob Fugger, and her noting, in their cor- respondence, of the passage which documents that Strada made designs for the Vienna Neugebäude as well as for the Munich Antiquarium. Von Busch confirmed Renate Rieger’s intimation that Strada was in some way implicated in the design of the Neugebäude merely in a footnote. It was in- vestigated in detail in Hilda Lietzmann’s monograph on that huge monument, a book which has put it on the art historical map and has doubtless stimu- lated the attempts of the last decades to rehabilitate its remains.74 Lietzmann provides the first more or less all-round appreciation of Jacopo Strada as an artist and places him in the context of the artistic and architectural patronage at court. She is the first to insist that Strada’s salary as a court architect pre- supposes his serious involvement in at least some of the projects initiated by Ferdinand i and Maximilian ii. She is the first to advance the plausible attribu- tion of the design of the Stallburg to Strada. This annexe to the Hofburg was built for Maximilian ii as heir to the throne between 1559, when Strada had just arrived, and 1565.75 With the Neugebäude she thus also puts Strada himself on the map, which resulted in sections both on the Neugebäude and on Strada himself in the Vienna version of the Giulio Romano exhibition of 1989–1990.76 As a follow-up, Lietzmann published some additional documents on Strada, highlighting certain unknown aspects of his later career.77 In a very interesting article published in 2006 Wolfgang Lippmann analyses the Neugebäude in the light of the results of material research on the complex, and places it in a wid- er European context, but adds little to Lietzmann as far as Strada’s role in its 74 Von Busch 1987; cf. my review, Jansen 1988(b). 75 Lietzmann 1987, pp. 113–114. 76 Fürstenhöfe der Renaissance 1990, pp. 356–377 (on the Neugebäude); pp. 308–323 (on Strada, curated by the present author). 77 Lietzmann 1997; Lietzmann 1998.