Page - 115 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

115In Hans Jakob Fugger’s Service The Ehrenspiegel cannot compete with, say, the Grimani Breviary or the Farnese Hours in artistic quality: in fact, as Hartig points out, all superfluous and distracting decoration is studiously avoided. But it is exceptional in that its illustrations—an extraordinary collection of portraits, views of towns and villages, battles, emblems and coats of arms—are the fruit of a conscious and sustained attempt at historical and topographical accuracy: some of the min- iatures document in detail monuments and inscriptions that had already been destroyed at the time [Figs. 3.8 and 3.9].11 This interest in drawings and engrav- ings not as works of art, but as documents, as more or less reliable sources of information, is, as we shall see, typical for Fugger and his circle; and Strada soon demonstrated that he fully shared this attitude. More than as a historiographer—the treatise on the Schmalkaldic Wars had no influence, since it was never published!—or as ‘Fundator’ of the Eh- renspiegel, Fugger is of importance for his extraordinary patronage of learning. (now in Vienna, önb-hs, Cod. 8613, 8614 and 8614*; descriptions and access to digital versions http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/AL00171034; http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/ AL00171035; http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/AL00171036; secretly he also made a second copy on behalf of Archduke Maximilian, Rudolf ii’s youngest brother (now in Dresden, Landesbibliothek). See Hartig 1917, pp. 197–199 and Beilage xiii, pp. 332–334; Maasen 1922, pp. 59–70; Welt im Umbruch 1980 (Cat.), i, nr. 160, pp. 223; Fugger im Bild 2010, Teil 1, pp. 108–111. 11 Hartig 1917, p. 198: ‘Die Vorlagen des Künstlers nachzuweisen brächte hier grösseren wis- senschaftliche Gewinn als die Ermittlung der Quellen des Schriftstellers’. Figures 3.8–3.9 A page from the Vienna version of the Ehrenspiegel Österreichs, and a detail showing the silver shrine for the relics of Margrave Leopold III of Austria, commissioned on the occasion of his canonization by Emperor Maximilian I; Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.