Page - 149 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

149In Hans Jakob Fugger’s Service When Strada wrote the preface to his Epitome thesauri antiquitatum he knew this collection, which Grolier had taken with him when he moved to Paris in 1530, only by reputation. He expressed the hope to be able to visit it in the future, for he considered it as ‘tout ce que je pense me rester touchant la perfection de mon livre’.75 It appears, however, that this visit never took place, because he had been shown the very few coins from Grolier’s collection that he mentions in his Διασκευέ either in Lyon or in Rome. It is easy to suggest some possible explanations for this fact: he may have met Grolier himself in either place (Grolier still possessed a house in Lyon), or may have seen coins destined for the collection in the hands of one of Grolier’s agents, while it is also possible that he only knew them by means of drawings or casts. Strada never refers to a visit to the French court—not even in his preface to Serlio’s Settimo libro, where one would expect it—and in his Διασκευέ he mentions no  Parisian  collectors apart from Grolier. This indicates that if Strada visited Paris or Fontainebleau at all, he cannot have remained there for any consider- able time. 3.6 Strada’s Contacts in Lyon: Sebastiano Serlio Most of the learned men mentioned above were humanists chiefly interested in antiquarian material, such as coins and inscriptions, which provided fixed and reliable data that could be used to interpret the literary sources, and thus could help to reconstruct the political history and aspects of the civilization of the Roman Empire. This was done, for instance, in Guillaume Du Choul’s Dis- cours de la réligion des anciens Romains, printed by Rouillé in 1556. Du Choul was one of the few scholars who paid particular attention to the architecture of the ancients, including in his treatise, as we have seen, reconstructions of some of the temples of Rome that Strada had provided him with [Figs. 3.56–3.57]. Du Choul’s interest in such practical aspects of Roman civilization is confirmed by two other treatises, the Discours sur la castramétation et discipline militaire des Romains and Des bains et antiques exercitations Grècques et Romaines, printed together in 1555, likewise by Rouillé, and often reprinted. Such interest in clas- sical architecture was not completely new in Lyon: several of its scholars and poets referred to the remains of the Roman city that could still be observed 75 Strada 1553<b>, p. bb-v.