Page - 170 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter 3170 Pantagato had not allowed Strada to study their coins or, more likely, did not possess any of particular merit: after all not every humanist felt it necessary to spend his money on such tokens of erudition. While Strada describes only a few coins from the collection of Alessandro Farnese, the fact that he mentions about fifty from the cabinet of Annibale Caro, an important man of letters who was particularly closely connected to Farnese, indicates that he did in- deed have regular contacts with the circle of the Cardinal, whom he describes as his patron. Strada also visited the collections of a number of Roman pa- tricians, such as Stefano del Bufalo, Alessandro Corvino and the enigmatic, unidentified Pyrrho Aloysio (Alvise?) Manlilio (Manilio?). Chief among these was Achille Maffei, whose family had collected antiquities already since the end of the fifteenth century, and whose numismatic collection appears to have been of outstanding size and quality: Strada included the description of hun- dreds of Maffei’s coins in the Διασκευέ.114 Several entries confirm that Strada actively hunted for antique coins; he regularly frequented the shops of famous antique dealers, though he rarely mentioned them by name: ‘in Romano sub- urbio apud quendam antiquarium’, ‘apud antiquarium in Foro Panthei’ and so on. Exceptions are the most renowned of Roman antique-dealers, Antonietto ‘delle Medaglie’ and a certain ‘Dominicus’, probably the gem-cutter, medalist and dealer Domenico Compagni, also known as Domenico de’ Cammei. It is not clear whether he is identical with a Venetian dealer ‘Domenico antiquario’ whose shop Strada visited on another occasion. But Strada also found antique medals among the stock of goldsmiths, money-changers and junk-dealers: ‘apud quendam aurifabrum’, ‘apud mensarium quendam Romae in suburbano vico’, ‘apud scrutarium Romae prope Pacis’, ‘apud scrutarium Romae in Campo Florae’, and ‘è regione D[ivi] Marcelli’, and so on.115 Oddly enough Strada ap- parently was not allowed to study Pirro Ligorio’s collection, which is never re- ferred to, though he later did cite Ligorio’s opinion on a given coin in support of his own, and must have met him repeatedly.116 He did, however, consult the 114 Most of the collections visited by Strada are listed in the survey of Roman collections of antiquities of the sixteenth century given in Bober-Rubinstein 1986, pp. 471–480; for the Maffei collection, see p. 476, which also illustrates Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawing of the cortile of the Maffei house in the Via della Pigna; see now also the survey of owners mentioned by Enea Vico in Missere Fontana 1994. 115 Little is known about these various shops: see McCrory 1987. Strada does not mention two other well-known dealers, Vincenzo and Gian Antonio Stampa, who purveyed antiquities to the Florentine court. 116 In a letter to Maximilian ii, doc. 1559-06-06; published in Jansen 1993<a>, pp. 233–235.