Page - 69 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

69Travel—Wenzel Jamnitzer rest of Southern Italy and Sicily, but since he appears to have been an indefati- gable traveller even when he was quite old and plagued by the gout, this is not impossible. Doubtless he carefully studied what ancient remains he could find in the towns he visited.5 Thus, he claims to have executed a series of measured drawings of the remains of principal classical monuments of the Urbs; if so, this activity should probably be assigned to his earlier visit rather than to his shorter, very busy sojourn of 1554–1556.6 Judging from his later interests, how- ever, we can rest assured that he paid at least equal attention to the artistic achievements of his contemporaries. 2.2 Residence in Germany Strada’s subsequent trips in foreign countries—that is, in Germany and in France—appear to have been characterized by a comparable attitude of en- lightened and informed tourism, judging from the preface to his Epitome the- sauri antiquitatum quoted earlier. Here Strada claimed that he had undertaken his travels partly for the sake of collecting numismatic material for his book, and partly ‘to know the manners of the foreigners, and the beauty of the land- scape of their country’. Yet it is rather likely that he had some more pressing and specific reasons to choose Germany, rather than to follow in the footsteps of Primaticcio, towards that haven of emigrant Italian artists, Fontainebleau.7 5 Melissus’ poem praises Strada’s knowledge of antiquities from Asia Minor and Northern Af- rica; whether this implied travel (for instance to Constantinople, and /or participation in Charles v’s expedition to Tunis in 1535) must remain open to question: Strada was compe- tent in using his network of friends and acquaintances to collect his materials. It should be noted that at this time Strada’s study of ancient coins had not yet assumed the systematic form which it would acquire during his first years in Germany, under the guidance of Hans Jakob Fugger: in his numismatic mss. Strada describes coins from collections he saw during his later visits to Rome and Venice (in the 1550s), while he does not mention any Neapolitan collection. 6 cf. Appendix ii, Index sive catalogus, nr. 34. On Strada’s later visit to Rome, partly on behalf of his patron Hans Jakob Fugger, see below, Ch. 3.6–7. 7 Strada 1553(b), p. aa 4 v: ‘pour congnoitre les moeurs des estrangers, et la beauté de l’assiette de leur région’. Strada may in fact have visited France even in the thirties, if one can believe a reference in a letter of his son Ottavio to Belisario Vinta, secretary of Grandduke Francesco i of Tuscany, dated Prague 6 December 1588, in which he offers to sell ‘donzine de belis- simi medaglioni <…> che mio padre bona memoria, già avanti 50 anni comprò in Franza <…>’ [asf, Medici del Principato 810, fol. 129]. It seems unlikely that Ottavio, who must have known, would have confused a visit in the late 1530s with his father’s certain visits to Lyon in the 1550s, i.e. during Ottavio’s childhood. The style of Strada’s few certain designs are in fact quite close to that of Primaticcio’s and his contemporaries in France.