Page - 56 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter �56 boy of his background who had demonstrated a particular intellectual ability. According to Josef Svátek, who did not cite his sources, Strada had studied at Pavia and Bologna, an assertion for which I have found no confirmation. Yet the possibility cannot be excluded, and it is corroborated by the fact that Strada is occasionally referred to as ‘il dottor Strada’.26 His presence in Bologna in the 1530s would be particularly significant: should he have studied there, he could have first met there at least some of the contemporaries with whom he would rub shoulders later in his career. One thinks of his later patron Hans Jakob Fugger; of Georg Sigismund Seld, afterwards as Reichsvizekanzler an extremely powerful member of the Imperial Court; of Otto Truchsess von Waldburg, afterwards Cardinal and Prince-Bishop of Augsburg [Fig. 1.15]; of the young Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, soon to be Bishop of Arras [Fig. 1.14]; of Paul iii’s grandson, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese [Fig. 1.16], and of the Span- ish scholar Antonio Agustín [below, Fig. 3.89]. Either at Bologna or Pavia he could have followed the courses of Andrea Al- ciati, the most celebrated specialist of Roman law of his time [Fig. 1.13]. Alciati’s profound interest in the purely antiquarian aspects of classical studies was at least partly responsible for the great advance in antiquarian studies in the 1540s and 1550s, to which several of his students—such as Agustín— notably contributed.27 Such training and such contacts would have contributed to the 26 Svátek 1883, p. 329. In his letters to Hans Jakob Fugger Niccolò Stopio sometimes refers scathingly to Strada as ‘il dottor Strada’, probably intended as a sarcasm [f.i. 19 October 1567, BHStA-LA 4852, fol. 80/74]; Jacopo was moreover probably identical with the ‘Dot- tore Strada’ whose presence was requested by some noblewomen of Mantua as a witness to their—forced—abjuration; probably this increased his troubles with the Inquisition; cf. Pagano 1991, pp. 7 and 16, n. 32. 27 On Alciati, see Abbondanza 1968. Alciati came to Pavia in 1533 from Bourges, taught at Bologna from 1537 until 1541, when he returned to Pavia. Fugger and Seld, who had already studied with Alciati in Bourges, arrived in Bologna in 1534. Alciati—who maintained contacts with many other learned Germans, such as Konrad Peutinger and Bonifazius Figure �.�3–�.�6 Andrea Alciati flanked by some of his pupils, Cardinals Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Otto Truchsess von Waldburg and Alessandro Farnese; in later life Strada would be in personal contact with all of these.