Page - 421 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

421The Munich Antiquarium 8.8 Conclusion: Strada’s Role in the Creation of the Antiquarium Summing up, Strada’s design for the Munich Antiquarium is a rather eclectic mixture of the architecture he knew best. In general it reflects his Mantuan upbringing: its general manner and style is far from the more strictly classical manner of contemporaries such as Vignola, Sansovino and Palladio, but close to that of Mantuan colleagues and fellow-pupils of Giulio’s, such as Ippolito Pedemonte and Giovanni Battista Bertani: the latter an exact contemporary whom he must have known from childhood, and with whom he still was in contact. Though the design reflects his awareness of such sources, he never ap- pears to have directly imitated a given example, and in so far his design is origi- nal, at times even eccentric. Its attention to the practical, functional aspects of the building reflect Strada’s familiarity with the work of Serlio, who displays a similar care for practical details, and his close concern with the function of the building, which was to house the library and the museum to which he himself had significantly contributed over the past twenty-five years. Remains the question in how far Strada’s design determined the actual fab- ric of the Antiquarium. It is quite clear that it was not used as the blueprint for the new building, which was eventually built according to the plans of the Augsburg master-mason Simon Zwitzel, the son of the builder of the Augsburg town library. Gabriele Dischinger first identified Zwitzel as the draughtsman of a design preserved in Munich of which the pertinence to the Antiquarium as actually built had not been recognized earlier. This is a purely technical draw- ing, a section through the main hall of the building, showing the construc- tion of the vault [Fig. 8.42].52 Photographs of the damage caused by bombs in the Second World War demonstrate that this solution was basically followed, showing the filling of the vaults and even the iron tie-rods anchoring the side walls to the beams carrying the floor of the library [Fig. 8.43]. This drawing was made in preparation for the actual construction, and was probably presented at—or was the result of?—a meeting in June 1569 when Fugger and Duke Albrecht’s Cammermeister discussed the project with the (un-named) master-mason who was to execute it, doubtless Simon Zwitzel.53 52 BHStA, Plansammlung nr. 7940; published in Dischinger 1988. Hartig found the drawing together with the minutes of a meeting in June 1569, in preparation of the actual construc- tion of the Antiquarium (cf. below). Stierhof, in Weski/Frosien-Leinz 1987, Textband, p. 22, n. 22, refers to it but oddly enough thinks that its proportions cannot be linked to the An- tiquarium, and interprets it as a section of a ‘Ganggebäude’, a corridor- or gallery-building. 53 These minutes, now lost, were originally found with Simon Zwitzel’s drawing, and pub- lished by Hartig 1933, p. 223; cf. Von Busch 1973, p. 133–135 and p. 300, n. 105–119; Dischinger 1988. An added note dates it June 1570, but Hubala and Von Busch plausibly argue that