Page - 37 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

37The Image—Or from Whom (Not?) to Buy a Second-Hand Car 0.10 What Has Not Been Written on Jacopo Strada The foregoing overview shows that almost everything ever written on Jacopo Strada was a spin-off of its author’s specialized interest in one of the fields in which Strada had been active, rather than an intrinsic interest in the career of this rather unusual personality. Even the careful reviews of his career by Renate von Busch and Hilda Lietzmann were the result of their exhaustive in- vestigations of the history of the collecting of antiquities at the Bavarian court, and of the history of Maximilian ii’s Neugebäude respectively. Given that most literature on Strada originates in such specialized research, it is not surprising that there remain some aspects of his career which have received little or no attention, even where such attention might have been expected. It is, for instance, remarkable that the presence of his portrait has not ex- cited greater interest in Vienna itself, where Strada reached the high point of his career. In the wake of Renate Rieger’s suggestions only a few remarks have been made about his influence on the developments of local architecture, fore- most by Hilda Lietzmann. An exception is Alfred Strnad’s wide-ranging survey of the reception of the Italian Renaissance in the Habsburg Erblande based on a very thorough examination of the available secondary sources. He pays much attention to the artistic developments in the sixteenth century and, following Lietzmann, briefly discusses Strada’s role.93 Until recently the Vienna court of this period in general has been little studied, compared to the courts of Maxi- milian i, Charles v and Rudolf ii. For the period of Ferdinand i, covering the first decade of Strada’s career at court, this was remedied by the huge exhibi- tion of the Kunsthistorisches Museum on the occasion of the fifth centenary of his birth in 2003. Though Strada was explicitly appointed as an architect by Ferdinand i, he does not figure at all in the catalogue, not even where existing documents might have made a discussion of his possible role useful, such as the Maximiliansgrab in Innsbruck.94 It is true that, at first sight, Vienna in the second half of the sixteenth cen- tury looks rather bleak, in contrast with the rich Middle Ages, culminating in the romantic figure of the ‘Last knight’, the Emperor Maximilian i, or with the baroque splendour of the Austrian court in the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. But this bleakness—and the resulting lack of interest among scholars—can be partly explained by the dearth of (published) sources and the relatively few monuments from the period that have survived intact. Most research has been done by art historians who were often employed at the 93 Strnad 1991, pp. 180–181, 222–224. 94 Kaiser Ferdinand i 2003; Altfahrt 2003.