Page - 357 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

357Projects for Emperor Ferdinand i itself. This is a building type that was current at the time in Southern Germa- ny, Austria and Bohemia, and would remain popular at least until the end of the century. The arcaded courtyard or Laubenhof had its roots in late medieval castle architecture of the region, but the forms that developed in the sixteenth century were strongly influenced by Florentine and North-Italian Quattrocen- to architecture. In many cases such castles were in fact designed and built by North-Italian stonemasons and builders. The trendsetter was Schloss Porcia in Spittal an der Drau, the earliest Renaissance castle in Austria, built from 1534 for Gabriel Salamanca, the Spanish treasurer and influential courtier of Ferdinand i [Figs. 6.27–6.28]. The type is particularly richly represented in Bohemia. Exam- ples are Litomyšl, Opočno, Bučovice, to name but a few. Many of these are of lat- er date, and were probably influenced to some extent by the Stallburg itself.30 Though planned from the late 1550s, construction appears no to have begun until 1563. By the time of Ferdinand’s death in 1564 it still was not completed: only in 1565 the masons Bärtlme Bethan and Antonio Pozo were paid for the construction of ‘den obristen ganng umb und umb 27 Pögn’ and a further seven arches ‘bej dem Eingang neben der Erdt’. This implies that the original plan was for a U-shaped building enclosing a courtyard of seven by ten bays. This was closed off towards the Lustgarten by a fourth wing of only one story high, consisting of a loggia of seven bays; possibly (but unlikely) this may even have been open on both sides. Even if this reading of the document is right, this fourth, shallow wing was run up to full height at least before the end of the cen- tury, as is evident from Hoefnagel’s 1609 bird’s-eye view of Vienna [Fig. 6.20].31 30 Plonner 1989; Rieger / Mitsch 1962. 31 Kühnel 1956, p. 215. The type of a U-shape arcaded courtyard closed off by a lower story on the fourth side became quite common in Bohemia in the later sixteenth century Figure 6.�9 The Stallburg, Vienna, corner Reitschulgasse and Habsburgergasse. Figure 6.�0 The Stallburg, in Jacob Hoefnagel’s 1609 bird’s-eye view of Vienna.