Page - 367 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

©  dirk jacob jansen, ���9  |  doi:�0.��63/9789004359499_009 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc-nd License. Chapter 7 An Object Lesson: Strada’s House in Vienna Though we cannot attribute any executed project in Vienna to Strada on the basis of incontrovertible evidence, there was one building of which he cer- tainly must have made the designs. Moreover here he certainly also closely supervised its execution, because he was not only its architect, but also its pa- tron. When Strada had come to court, he had immediately brought his family and household with him, clearly intending to settle in Vienna, where he soon acquired a plot of ground on which to build himself a house. By the autumn of 1562 he indicates, in a business letter to the French Ambassador, Bernardin Bochetel, Bishop of Rennes, that this was one of his chief occupations at the time: As to me and my family, we are all well; and I have become the complete philosopher, and I am always at home and attend to having built my little house.1 The reference to a ‘small’ house might be explained by a humanist conceit of modesty. But probably it refers to a house we know Strada at a later date possessed in St. Ulrich, a suburb of Vienna just outside the walls opposite the Hofburg. This may well be the house he had built soon after his arrival in Vienna, mentioned in his letter to Bochetel. The house we know that Strada did eventually build for himself certainly was not small, but he acquired its site only after 1563, when in the Hofquartier- bücher it is still indicated as ‘Herren von Prag behausung. Freyhaus’. It is indi- cated as ‘h. von Prag’ on Bonifaz Wolmut’s carefully measured plan of Vienna of 1547 [Fig. 7.1].2 It stood inside the city walls, in the close vicinity of the Hof- burg, at the end of the Vorderen Schenkenstrasse, the present Bankgasse. It was the last house before the huge bulk of the Löwelbastei, which stood more or less on the location of the present Burgtheater [Figs. 7.2–7.3]. Only in the Hofquartierbücher of 1566 its owner is indicated as ‘507. Jacob Strada. Das haus hat vor deren von Prag haus gehaissen. Freyhaus’.3 1 DOC. 1562-10-21. 2 Camesina 1856–1858. 3 The Hofquartierbücher are discussed and abstracted in Birk 1869 (the Strada house p. 124– 125), and Camesina 1881 (p. 21). But possibly Strada already leased the house in the Schenken- strasse by 1562 and began to convert it even before he definitely acquired it.