Page - 279 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

279Imperial Architect: Background 53 Extracted from Holtzmann 1903, passim. 1499, but again very popular in the 1540s. This book can stand as an excellent illustration of the link between court culture, humanist learning and knowl- edge of classical architecture [Fig. 5.30]. 5.2.4 The Prince as Architect: Practical Experience The architectural frame of reference that Maximilian could draw upon in his patronage was not, however, determined solely or even primarily by theoreti- cal treatises and more or less fanciful woodcuts. It is important to ask what architecture he had actually seen by 1555, and also which of these examples would have most impressed him, and why. A brief sketch of his itinerary will serve the purpose.53 Maximilian was born in the Vienna Hofburg, but he lived the first decade and a half of his life largely in Innsbruck, except for a year spent in Vienna when he was about ten years old. Only from 1543 onward did he begin to travel, at first in his father’s retinue, attending the 1543 Nuremberg Diet and visiting Prague for the first time. The next four years he spent in the retinue of Charles v, beginning with the French campaign ending in the capture of Soissons and the peace of Crépy, followed by a long sojourn at the Imperial court at Brussels (September 1544–March 1545). Fortification being an important subject for a prince and warrior in training, he will have been able to see for himself, or at least in its plans, the fortifications of Antwerp developed by the Italian architect Donato de’ Boni, who also designed the Imperial gate to that city which was being built at the time [Fig. 5.33]. Per- haps he also heard something about the plans of Charles v and of his aunt Mary of Hungary for their respective residences in Brussels and Binche that were to be realized in the following years. Travelling with the court and the army of Charles v during the months preceding and following the battle of Mühlberg (24 April 1547) he criss-crossed central and southern Germany, where he visited both friendly courts—such as Munich, Stuttgart, Jülich and Dresden—and the principal Im- perial towns, such as Aix-la Chapelle, Cologne, Worms, Speyer, Regensburg, Ulm, Nuremberg and Augsburg. With his father he visited most of the Habsburg do- minions in and bordering on Germany, including Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia. In 1548 Charles v and Ferdinand i agreed to a marriage settlement between Charles’ daughter Maria and Maximilian, who was given the title of King of Bohemia on the occasion. In June of that year Maximilian travelled from Augsburg, where he had been attending the famous geharnischte Reichstag, through Munich, Innsbruck, Bolzano and Trent to Mantua, and from there