Page - 173 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

173In Hans Jakob Fugger’s Service Fugger antedates his arrival in Rome, Agustín’s influence is probably respon- sible for some of the more scholarly aspects of Strada’s practice. Strada’s very precise, almost dry descriptions of the coins and his consequently noting the provenance of the model in his A.A.A. Numismatωn Antiquorum Διασκευέ, the separation of the coins struck in Greece and the East from the Latin ones in his Series presented to Emperor Maximilian ii—and perhaps also his providing the former with a title in Greek—as well as the addition of several exhaustive indices, may be instances of such influence. At the same time he must have been stimulated by the very lively milieu of scholars and amateurs regularly discussing points of history in the light of the information extracted from the coins and inscriptions that were so assiduously collected, though this stimu- lus proved more ephemeral. Learned discussions of individual coins, such as those scattered through Agustín’s correspondence with Panvinio, or included in Costanzo Landi’s In veterum numismatum romanorum miscellanea explica- tiones (printed in Lyon in 1550) are rare in Strada’s work: only occasionally he attempted more detailed interpretations of an individual reverse, for instance in the letter to Maximilian ii when King of Bohemia, in which he defended himself against the attack upon his scholarly accomplishments launched by his rival, the Imperial Historiographer Wolfgang Lazius. But such discourses show that he was at least well aware of the most recent developments in an- tiquarian scholarship, and this is borne out by one of his letters to Fugger, in which he demonstrates detailed knowledge of the origins of an important epi- graphic manuscript recently acquired by his patron: a ‘libro de’ pili in dissegno’ compiled in Rome at the instance of Granvelle, and commented upon by Mo- rillon; it is just possible that this volume can be identified with the so-called Codex Coburgensis.121 The Codex Coburgensis has been plausibly interpreted as more or less coinciding with one of the items included in the programme of publication envisaged by the Vitruvian Academy in Rome, strongly supported by Marcello Cervini, which has been briefly outlined above. Though no direct contacts between Strada and this Accademia del Virtù are documented, Strada was in touch with many of its individual members. It is difficult to imagine, howev- er, that a former pupil of Giulio Romano, who arrived in Rome carrying all of Sebastiano Serlio’s drawings and manuscripts—including those by Peruzzi and others that Serlio had brought together in the course of his long life, apart from much graphic material recently published in France—and who himself was an enthusiastic student of architecture and of Antiquity, would not have 121 Doc. 1559-06-06; see Jansen 1993<a>, pp. 223–226; its identification with the Codex Cobur- gensis suggested by Wrede 1997, but doubted by Crawford 1998, pp. 100–102.