Page - 131 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

131In Hans Jakob Fugger’s Service editions could be printed; and even then only a limited selection of illustrations could be realized. Just as Fugger had to employ learned scribes to obtain tran- scripts of Hebrew or Arab texts not yet in print, he had to rely on able draughts- men to obtain illustration of those objects of interest of which as yet no good prints had been published. And just as he had been stimulated to institution- alize his library by his contacts with Conrad Gesner, his contacts with Strada, who combined a lively intellectual curiosity with a thorough artistic training, had opened his eyes to the value of such visual documentation. Strada’s preoccupation with the collecting and diffusion of information in visual form became a Leitmotiv in his later career, and was fully shared by his patron. This is demonstrated not only by the numismatic corpus and other comparable material that Fugger acquired from Strada himself, such as the splendid illuminated volumes documenting the coats of arms of Popes and Cardinals, of Italian states and cities, and their noble and patrician fami- lies [Figs. 3.34–3.36], but also by, for instance, a (lost) manuscript version of Jean-Jacques Boissard’s book on costume, and the series of portraits and arms of the Popes commissioned from Onofrio Panvinio.39 39 Strada’s so-called ‘Italienische Wappenbücher’ (Munich, bsb-hs, Cod. icon 266–280) are described in Kulturkosmos der Renaissance, cat. nr. 57, pp. 164–165. They are integrally accessible through www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de. Boissard’s ms. was dedicated to Fugger and dated 1559 (Hartig 1917, p. 120, nr. 93) and is discussed in great detail in Thimann 2005. Panvinio, with whom Fugger corresponded extensively in 1562– 1567 [extracts published in Maasen 1922, Beilagen nrs. 6–51, pp. 97–126] also provided Figures 3.34–3.36 Workshop of Jacopo Strada: coats of arms of the city of Rome, of Duke Guglielmo of Mantua, and of four noble families of Mantua (including his own), from the albums of armorial drawings commissioned by Hans Jakob Fugger; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.