Page - 174 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter 3174 been welcomed by the members of the academy resident in Rome at that time. Certainly the ambitious programme of publications that Strada first began to develop about this time rather closely echoes that formulated by Claudio Tolo- mei in his letter quoted above, a letter Strada would have known, since it was printed already in 1547.122 It is striking that many of the activities Strada en- gaged in during his stay in Rome seem to fit into the objectives of the Academy, though many of them must have been primarily connected to the commis- sions Fugger had given him. 3.8 Commissions and Purchases: The Genesis of Strada’s Musaeum 3.8.1 Acquisition of Antiques With his erudite research and his other enterprises, Strada was very strenuous- ly occupied during the two years of his residence in Rome. Unfortunately it is difficult to establish in how far Strada’s activities were related to specific com- missions from Fugger, and in how far he acted on his own initiative and in his own immediate interest. It is clear that no exclusive relationship to any patron in Rome was established, and it is rather likely that Strada maintained him- self, his family and the other members of his retinue at least in part from the income deriving from Fugger’s commissions. In the preface to his 1575 edition of Caesar he described his trip to Rome as an explicit initiative of his patron, who had charged him to ‘to acquire gold, silver and bronze coins and marbles of remarkable antiquity, which I at great expense had brought to Augsburg’.123 This suggests that Strada’s principal object was the acquisition of antiquities for Fugger’s growing collection: when Strada frequented the shops of various antiquarians and peddlers he doubtless did not limit himself to studying their coins in order to complete his numismatic Corpus, but also selected those ob- jects with which he thought best to enrich Fugger’s studio. He also purchased antique statuary on Fugger’s behalf, of which very little is known: Strada em- phasises the busts of Emperor’s and Empresses, which accords well with his patron’s historical interest, and such busts were a most suitable type of deco- ration of the library in which Fugger’s collection was collocated. But Strada’s 122 Tolomei’s letter published in De le lettere di M. Claudio Tolomei libri sette, Venezia (Gioliti) 1547; it is reprinted and commented in Barocchi 1971–1977, iii, pp. 3037–3047. The pro- gramme of the Vitruvian Academy commented in Daly Davis 1989 and Daly Davis 1994, pp. 11–20. 123 Strada’s preface to his edition of Caesar 1575; cf. below, Ch. 12.3.