Page - 147 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

147In Hans Jakob Fugger’s Service One would expect Strada to have wished to profit from his sojourn in Lyon by visiting Paris and to the principal centre of visual culture of the French Re- naissance, Fontainebleau. The style of the title pages he drew for his manu- script numismatic works [Figs. 3.22–3.23, 3.62 and below, Fig. 4.04] reminds one of the courtly Mannerism of the School of Fontainebleau rather than the work of his contemporaries in Italy itself. Yet the only indication that he may have done so is a reference to the royal treasurer Jean Grolier (1479–1565) in the preface to the Epitome thesauri antiquitatum. Nowadays Grolier is best known as the owner of a splendid library: because of their superb bindings, books from his library count among the principal treasures of libraries and collec- tors lucky enough to possess them. But he also had a great interest in classical Antiquity; he was in touch with the informal academy of scholars and artists around Cardinal Marcello Cervini in Rome which attempted to reconstruct Roman civilisation by studying both classical texts and the physical relics unearthed in the city and elsewhere: coins, inscriptions, sculptures and other antique artefacts, and the ruins of ancient edifices. Grolier was particularly interested in coins, to the extent of financing the publication, at the Aldine press in Venice, of the second edition of Budé’s fun- damental treatise De asse et partibus eius, which appeared in 1522. Grolier’s expertise in the field gained him a place in a royal commission supervising the minting of French coin. In his house in the Rue de la Juiverie in Lyon he had brought together a collection of antique coins and statuary, which he had ac- quired by means of agents he employed to this purpose, and which was highly esteemed by Du Choul: ‘Monsieur the treasurer Grolier, an exceptional lover of Antiquity, in whose hands can be found the most beautiful medallions that can be found in our France at present’.73 An example of the beautiful small boxes in which he kept his medals, like his book bindings covered in gold-stamped morocco, is still preserved in the Musée Condé at Chantilly.74 Juřen 1988, p. 21 and fig. 3. Symeoni was a close associate of Du Choul, whose works he translated into Italian. Strada used two well-known images connected to the device Festina lente device (which he quotes in Greek, rather than in Latin), combining the crab- and-butterfly with the dolphin-and-anchor familiar from Aldus Manutius’ printer’s mark. 73 Du Choul 1556, p. 32: ‘Monsieur le Tresorier Grolier, amateur singulier de l’antiquité en- tre les mains duquel sont les plus beaux medaillons, que pour le iourd’huy se puissent trouuer en nostre Gaulle’; cf. Bruyère 1993, p. 111. On Grolier and his collection, see Portalis / Le Roux de Lincy 1907; Austin 1971, in particular its introductory chapter by Colin Eisler, ‘Jean Grolier and the Renaissance’; Hobson 1975. 74 Austin 1971, pp. 31–32. Grolier’s interest in classical coins helps explain his pioneering use of stamps based on antique coins in the bindings made for some of his books.