Page - 220 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter 4220 he appears to have found it difficult to make up his mind. At one time he had asked Anton Fugger to suggest a name of a competent painter to provide an advice as to its decoration, and in 1550 no fewer than three painters, Christoph Amberger, Hans Kels and Heinrich Kron, had actually presented drawings for the project.63 Though already in 1555 a definitive decision on its decoration appears to have been taken, only now concrete steps were taken to execute it, to which purpose Schallautzer was instructed to summon the painter Domenico Pozzo. It is not known when this Milanese painter had entered Ferdinand’s service; he worked mostly in Innsbruck, where he painted the Annunciation on the shut- ters of the famous organ by Jörg Ebert in the Hofkirche. Later he would work also in Vienna and Prague.64 But at the time he appears to have been working— probably for King Maximilian—in the Imperial hunting lodge at Kaisereber- sdorf. Certainly it was from there that Schallautzer summoned him to hear Ferdinand’s instructions, to show him the enclosed ‘Vysierung’—doubtless a schematic drawing showing the division of the ceiling—and to commis- sion him ‘<...>das er in allen gevierte und gespitzte Feldung ein sonndere fein 63 Fellmayer / Oettinger / Scheicher 1986, p. 63. 64 Thieme-Becker 26, p. 32; Dreger 1914, p. 115; Podewils 1992, p. 257–58. Figure 4.12 A hypothetical reconstruction of the earlier version of the lay-out of the ceiling of the Goldene Saal in the Innsbruck Hofburg. Planned to consist of sixty-three diagonally placed ‘square and pointed’ panels, it was later modified to a more monumental one, in which thirty-five larger panels offered greater scope for the planned ‘fantasies’ that Domenico Pozzo was to paint in them.