Page - 36 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Introduction36 in fact a larger responsibility in this field than has previously been assumed follows from new finds in archives in Mantua and Vienna, published by Elena Venturini and by Otto Schindler, by the recent find and convincing attribution of two autograph designs for such festival costumes by Zoltán Kárpáti, and by the even more recent identification of two volumes of festival designs from Strada’s workshop in the Dresden Kupferstichkabinett by Gudula Metze and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. Kaufmann has repeatedly returned to Strada also in other contexts.91 Following in Kaufmann’s footsteps the intellectual historian Howard Lou- than included a detailed investigation of Strada’s career at the Imperial court in his The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna of 1997. In this book he selects four key-figures—‘Peacemakers in Counter- Reformation Vienna’—whose exploits in various fields exemplify the con- ciliating or irenic aspirations of Maximilian and his entourage. The fields he discusses are politics, exemplified by Maximilian’s general Lazarus von Schwendi; religion, illustrated by his personal physician Johannes Crato; hu- manist learning, illustrated by his librarian Hugo Blotius; and finally the arts, illustrated by Jacopo Strada, who, Louthan stresses, ‘helped transform a more provincial Habsburg court into a sophisticated and international center of ar- tistic activity’. In her article ‘The appropriation of Italian Renaissance art by German courts’, Barbara Marx accorded Strada an important place in this pro- cess, stressing his role as mediator in particular in the acquisition of antiqui- ties by German princes. She considers such antiquities as explicit markers of the values (and the fashions?) of the Italian Renaissance as adopted by the more ambitious courts north of the Alps. They functioned as such both in the originals, such as those brought together in Duke Albrecht v’s Antiquarium in Munich, and in their graphic representations, such as those provided by the Strada workshop: Marx is the first to publish illustrations from a manuscript of drawings of imperial busts Ottavio Strada presented to Grand Duke Francesco i of Tuscany.92 their documented connection to Ottavio Strada are discussed by Ilse O’Dell, who however did not recognize the link between these prints and the Strada drawings (O’dell 1990). 91 Venturini 2002, p. 102; Schindler 2004, p. 312; Schindler 2006, (p. 336).; Kárpáti 2012; Kaufmann, ‘Giuseppe Arcimboldo: Learning, Letters, Art’, in: Arcimboldo 1526-1593 2007, pp. 273–279. On the festival designs, including the as yet unpublished Dresden drawings, see below, Ch. 4.3.4. 92 Louthan 1997, p. 8. On Strada, see chiefly Ch. 2: ‘Jacopo Strada and the transformation of the imperial court’ (pp. 24–46); Marx 2007, pp. 204–214 and figs. 52–53.