Page - 217 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

217Tasks at the Imperial Court In the first place it should be kept in mind that most of the archival data which document Strada’s activities at court are taken from the records of the Hofkammer, the financial administration. I have pointed out elsewhere that these in themselves may well be incomplete, since the Emperor disposed of other than purely pecuniary means to materially reward services rendered, such as payments in kind, which Strada at least occasionally received; a con- sideration that helps to widen the gap between rewards and documented ser- vices.57 Except for the payment of the two salaries, which are quite regularly entered in the books (though far less punctually discharged, especially to- wards the end of Maximilian’s reign), all registered payments refer to ex- traordinary expenses, in particular travel allowances and payments for goods provided. This warrants the perhaps rather obvious conclusion that the two salaries Strada received were considered to cover most of his regular servic- es, for which no separate payment was necessary, and of which no account was kept. It also implies that—apart from the books of drawings—he did not provide independent works of art—such as paintings—produced by himself or in his studio, because these were generally separately paid for. But it does not necessarily exclude that he provided ideas and sketches, or even worked- out designs, to be used by other court-artists. And neither does it necessar- ily exclude that he provided individual objects from his Musaeum—or from his stock-in-trade as a bookseller and art-dealer?—which may have been paid in cash or in some other way in which the identity of the seller remained anonymous. In the second place it must be pointed out that the dearth of sources on Strada’s activities is by no means exceptional: the documentation of the artis- tic patronage of the Austrians Habsburgs in their own capital is extremely in- complete. Even the genesis of Maximilian’s grandest project, the Neugebäude, can only be reconstructed from very incomplete financial sources: it was hard- ly ever mentioned explicitly even in his own correspondence, as far as known to date.58 Until the recent publication of the results of the Hofburg project, it was simply not known when as important an extension of the Hofburg as the Neue Burg or Amalienburg—also known as Ernestinische Trakt, having been originally conceived as the residence of Archduke Ernest— was given its basic architectonic order: dates given in the earlier literature vary between the 1570s and the 1620s!59 57 Jansen 1988<c>; Jansen 1992. 58 On the Neugebäude, see below, Ch. 9. 59 On the Amalienburg, see now Holzschuh-Hofer 2014 (d); cf. below, Ch. 10.2.