Page - 414 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter 8414 As we have seen, it is likely that the Antiquarium was to double occasionally as a hall for festivities, and a vaulted ceiling would better protect it from the fire necessary to heat it—Strada’s design includes a fireplace—and even more, to light it: in particular the torches used in festivities would pose a serious fire- hazard. Both the Munich design of 1568 and Strada’s therefore include vaulting on the ground floor, the lateral forces of which were to be contained by the but- tress-like piers structuring the walls. Strada’s wish—in contrast to the Munich design—not to divide the space demanded a huge and therefore quite high vault, high certainly in proportion to the height of the wall: the proportion of vault (from its apex to the top of the cornice) to wall (from top of the cornice to floor level) is almost exactly 1 : 1. This means that the ground floor, the Antiquarium, takes up almost twice as much of the height of the building as the top floor, the library. Though we cannot be certain that Fugger and Strada considered these two functions as equivalent, this seems rather likely; that they also would have wished this equiv- alence to be expressed in the architecture of the building would well explain why both Strada and the anonymous Munich designer in their facades tried Figure 8.25 Comparison on scale of the interior and the exterior elevation of Jacopo Strada’s design for the Munich Antiquarium.