Page - 51 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

5�Early Years Doubtless the chief formative influence of Strada’s life was the fact of his having been born in Mantua, in those years arguably the major Italian court after the Roman Curia. Strada grew up in the Mantua of Federico ii Gonzaga, fifth Marquis and first Duke of Mantua, and of his forceful and cultured moth- er, Isabella d’Este, ‘summi ingenii ac rarae virtutis heroina’ according to Ulisse Aldrovandi.18 Of equal importance, this was the Mantua of Federico’s principal artist and prefetto delle fabbriche, Giulio Romano, who gave shape to the Man- tuan splendour dreamt of by his patrons; a splendour which was, much later, so loyally publicized by Strada himself.19 Perhaps the most salient characteristic of Mantua as an independent state was that its head—the dynasty, the court—was much too big for its body: though situated in the fertile valley of the Po, it was a state of middling size and of modest economic and strategic importance. Neither the notorious ‘splendour’ of the Gonzaga dukes, nor their close relationship with the Emper- or himself would suffice to arrest the relative ascendency of their Florentine cousins, which culminated in the Pope conferring the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany on Cosimo i in 1569: a cause célèbre which would haunt international diplomacy for almost a decade. Yet this splendour was truly exceptional, and is best illustrated by the sheer size of Federico ii’s court. His household com- prised close to thousand members, as many as were enrolled in the households of the Emperors Ferdinand i and Maximilian ii themselves. Not surprisingly, it was greatly reduced at his death. The presence of such a disproportionate courtly environment in a relatively modest country town like Mantua implies that the culture at court was more easily diffused among a relatively large pro- portion of the population than it was in larger towns such as Rome, Milan or Florence. It is doubtless no pure coincidence that Strada’s principal interests closely corresponded to some of this culture’s major preoccupations, preoc- cupations which had been ruling passions for several generations of Gonzaga. Central among these was their profound interest in classical Antiquity, both in an historical and in a more strictly archaeological sense, a humanist inter- est not surprising in the town which boasted Virgil as its most illustrious son. 18 Bologna, University Library, Fondo Aldrovandi, Ms. 136, fols. 27v–29v; quoted in Scienza A Corte 1979, p. 186 and document n. 60, p. 237. 19 A vast literature on Mantua in the Renaissance exists. The catalogue of the London exhi- bition Splendours of the Gonzaga 1981 provides a convenient general introduction in Eng- lish. The basic modern history of Mantua is Mantova: La Storia, Le Lettere, Le Arti; more recent literature (books published 1980–1989) given in Padovani 1989. In the following sketch I have refrained from citing the relevant secondary sources, which would swell the bibliography to unmanageable proportions; literature used for particular problems will be cited where appropriate.