Page - 54 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter �54 art and antiquities which at its fateful sale to Charles i of England in 1627–1628 was among the very first in Europe.21 1.3 Formal Education In view of the institutional accessibility of a princely court in general and of the relative size of Federico’s court, which was largely recruited from Mantua itself, the courtly environment could not fail to impress an intelligent and curi- ous youngster such as Jacopo must have been. In view of his father’s status as a Gonzaga ‘vasallo’ and his function in the Ducal administration, Jacopo must have had some immediate experience of it, possibly even as a page or in some other minor function within the household. If so, he would have had ample opportunity to get acquainted both with the intellectual preconceptions of this erudite milieu and with the material sediment in which these preconcep- tions found their expression: the collections brought together by the Gonzaga and the artistic creations they commissioned. In any case his later accomplish- ments indicate that he received both the formal education that was habitual for boys of his background and an artistic training. Strada doubtless received grounding in the studia humanitatis in Mantua, perhaps even within the direct ambit of the court, following a curriculum rooted in the tradition of Vittorino da Feltre’s celebrated Cà Giocosa.22 The contention implied in a passage in Antonio Agustín’s Dialoghi intorno alle medaglie, that Strada, like Pirro Ligorio, Hubert Goltzius and Enea Vico, would have known hardly any Latin, should be critically interpreted for each of these celebrated artist-antiquaries.23 That Strada’s classical and linguistic studies bore fruit is clear from his later activities: neither his numismatic studies nor his polyglot lexicography is conceivable for someone who had not received a thorough training in the classical languages. It is true that Strada’s correspondence is largely in Italian, but in that he is no exception: even Agustín himself, who certainly was an im- portant classical scholar, corresponded in Italian with his friend Onofrio Pan- vinio, one of the most brilliant scholarly antiquaries of the sixteenth century.24 21 The fundamental study on the dispersal of the Gonzaga collections remains Luzio 1913; more recently, Howarth 1981. 22 On Vittorino, see Garin 1958; In Traccia del Magister Pelicanus 1979. 23 Agustín 1592, p. 117. For Agustín ‘intendere la Lingua Latina’ implied not merely being able to read and/or write Latin, but being professionally trained as a classical philologist; see below, Ch. 15.1. 24 Agustín 1980, passim.