Page - 183 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

183In Hans Jakob Fugger’s Service the sixteenth century—as well as the monuments from classical Antiquity that so strongly inspired the creations of that period. Thus their purchase by Strada can be regarded as part of a conscious programme of acquisition di- rected at building up a collection of first-hand documentation not only of the material relics of Antiquity, but also of the art and architecture of Raphael and his school, that is of the art and architecture that by Vasari’s time already had achieved a canonical status. This programme may have been inspired and partly financed by Hans Ja- kob Fugger: such material provided the visual complement to the written documentation present in his library. Yet it is likely that Strada also collected material for himself. Whereas at least part of the documentation he specially commissioned, such as the drawings of the Vatican Loggia, was destined for his patron, there is evidence that he kept the original material acquired respec- tively from Serlio, Perino’s widow, and Giulio Romano’s son, for himself.138 And it seems likely that he kept copies for himself even of the documentation he commissioned for Fugger or for other patrons. In this way his travels allowed him to lay the foundations for the collection he proudly indicated with the term Musaeum, and which can be considered to anticipate on a more modest scale the famous Musaeum chartaceum brought together in the first half of the seventeenth century by Cassiano dal Pozzo. An attempt to identify at least some of the contents of Strada’s graphic collection will be made in Chapter 13; its function in relation to Strada’s professional activities will be a recurrent theme in the rest of this book. 3.9 Departure from Rome Though Strada’s acquisition of these materials accorded with Fugger’s ideas, it is not likely that all of them were made on his account. It is clear that Strada did not regard himself as indissolubly bound to Fugger, because he also offered his numismatic drawings to other patrons. The Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris owns a beautiful manuscript presenting pre-imperial coinage in a make- up identical to the volumes commissioned by Fugger; its elegant titlepage indi- cates that it was made in Rome in 1554, though its intended recipient remains 138 Such material was used in the Libri di disegni produced in Strada’s workshop; some of his acquisitions figure in the list of illustrated publications Strada intended to publish (below, Ch. 14).