Page - 119 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

119In Hans Jakob Fugger’s Service books with sturdy and well-designed bindings, he was chiefly interested in the texts themselves, in the information his books contained, rather than in their rarity or splendour: this explains why he was often satisfied with good modern transcripts, provided that they were written in a good hand and by a learned scribe, and why he acquired a proportionately large number of Greek manu- scripts: so many Latin texts were, after all, already available in good printed versions. Though the collection of classical and biblical texts in the three ancient lan- guages must be considered as the backbone of Fugger’s library, and he himself was particularly interested in classical and modern historiography and its aux- iliary sciences (such as numismatics and epigraphy), Fugger’s conscious aim was to build up an extensive but balanced body of documentation covering all branches of science and the humanities. Such encyclopaedic passion clearly reflects the spirit of the age, a spirit which is evident in the proliferation of dictionaries—or ‘Theatres’, ‘Promptuaria’ etc.—that attempted to codify hu- man knowledge, such as the Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium, pub- lished in 1548 by Fugger’s protégé Conrad Gesner [Fig. 3.10]. This bulky volume, containing no less than thirty thousand subject entries, cross-references, and bibliographical data, was itself merely the companion volume of Gesner’s Bib- liotheca Universalis, a four-volume bibliography of all books in Latin, Greek and Hebrew ever printed. Its first edition was published in 1545 [Fig. 3.11], soon followed by a supplement volume, as well as by some cheaper, abridged edi- tions.19 It is clear that the Biblioteca Universalis strongly stimulated Fugger’s ideas: in the very year that it came out he unsuccessfully invited Gesner to be- come his first librarian. Gesner’s work probably first made Fugger think of his library as an independent instrument of research, as an institution rather than as a private library: the Bibliotheca Universalis became the ideal model for his library, rather than just a convenient guide for future acquisitions.20 Fugger’s thirst for universal knowledge and his interest in a systematical- ly accessible arrangement of such knowledge are confirmed by his connec- tions with the Antwerp doctor Samuel Quiccheberg, whom he appointed as his librarian in about 1559, and who appears also to have been charged with 19 Gesner 1545 and 1555 (and facsimile reprint with introduction: Gesner/Widmann 1966); Gesner 1548; on Gesner as a bibliographer, see Hartig 1917, passim; Besterman 1936, pp. 33–41; Fischer 1966; Eisenstein 1979, pp. 97–100; Braun 1990. 20 Gesner proposed that the systematic part of his catalogue could be used as the catalogue of any library, if one marked in it the books owned; and the margins offered some space for adding new publications. A copy belonging to Hans Jakob’s nephew, Philip Eduard Fugger, demonstrates that this was in fact occasionally done (see Gesner/ Widmann 1966).