Page - 82 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter 282 studied in Italy—and to the printing presses of Anton Koberger and Johannes Petreius. Several of its artists—Veit Stoss, Adam Krafft and Peter Vischer in the late fifteenth century, Wenzel Jamnitzer in the sixteenth century—had inter- national reputations. Printers and publishers all over the Empire employed its engravers, and its most famous son, Albrecht Dürer, was and is rightly consid- ered the greatest non-Italian artist of the Renaissance. Coupled to the political stability guaranteed by its conservative patriciate, this all made Nuremberg a place that offered a wealth of opportunities to any talented and enterprising young man. Again, very little is known about what Strada actually did in Nuremberg. At the time he certainly already was occupied with his antiquarian studies fi- nanced by Hans Jakob Fugger. Nuremberg was no unfavourable location for such research. The wealth and intellectual interests of her citizens is best il- lustrated by the fact that Samuel Quiccheberg, in his Inscriptiones vel tituli the- atri amplissimi of 1565, lists no less than nineteen collectors; by no means all of these belonged to the few old and extremely wealthy families from whose ranks the town’s government was co-opted.31 For several of the Roman coins described in Strada’s manuscript A.A.A. Numismatωn Antiquorum Διασκευέ a provenance from some of these same Nuremberg collectors is given: apart from an anonymous Paduan erudite, he mentions Johann Starck, a patrician and member of the Council, Georg Römer, Johann Kandler and (his son?) Georg Kandler. The Kandlers were merchants who chiefly dealt in copper and brass from Northern Italy: sharing other interests with Strada beside numis- matics, they probably made him feel welcome. In the first five volumes of his Διασκευέ he in fact describes over sixty coins from their collections.32 Since Georg Kandler was only born in 1531, Strada’s knowledge of his coins must at least in part date from later visits to Nuremberg, but his first contacts with the family doubtless dated from his period of residence. The most important collection in Nuremberg, from which Strada described about ninety coins in the Διασκευέ, belonged to the Nuremberg patrician Willibald Imhoff (1519–1580). An almost exact contemporary of Strada’s, Imhoff shared his interests: in an autograph inventory of his collection of 1573 he confessed that he had ‘from earliest youth onward, an innate and great 31 Quiccheberg 1565, pp. H i r. –v.; Quiccheberg knew some of these collections from his own visits, some he owed to Hubertus Goltzius’ appendix on collectors of antiquities in his Julius Caesar. 32 On the Διασκευέ, see Jansen 1993(a). On Georg Chanler of Kandler (Quiccheberg writes Chonler) (1531–1600), see Wenzel Jamnitzer 1985, p. 450, cat. nr. 637.