Page - 459 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

459The Neugebäude including their surrounding walls and the towers, appear to have been built more or less according to plan, without substantial changes during the ex- ecution, the project for the central building developed rapidly while it was actually executed. This led to many smaller and larger adaptations that can still be traced in the existing brickwork, and which occasionally even entailed demolishing parts that had already been constructed. It is unthinkable that the local master masons would have been allowed to exercise their fanta- sies in such a way: on the contrary, it is likely that these continual changes in plan, which must have been expensive, may have led to some irritation with those charged with their execution. So it is highly probable that these changes must have been not only condoned, but were instigated by the pa- tron, Maximilian ii, himself. They indicate the importance the project had for him, and how far he was prepared to go to realize his ideal. A good example is the change in floor level of the Neugebäude proper, which altered the rela- tion of the central building to its surroundings, as a consequence of which the terraces were restructured and the level of the whole of the northern garden was raised appreciably (which implied that it also had to be planted anew).40 It is true that the documentation on the artistic patronage at the Imperial court in the sixteenth century is extremely scanty and incomplete; yet it re- mains very odd that even for a project of the size and the extraordinary char- acter of the Neugebäude no name of a designing architect should have come down to us. To my mind this indicates at the very least that no one single professional was responsible for the project as a whole. Coupled to Maximil- ian’s amply documented personal involvement and the changes to the project realized during actual construction this suggests that he not only supervised, but personally participated in the designing process. Though doubtless the final designs were prepared for execution by one or more of his professional architects, such as Ferrabosco, the general concept of the complex and many of its eccentric details—such as the four hexagonal corner towers of the inner garden—may well be due to Maximilian himself. That he should have himself sketched out some of his ideas is not so strange at it may seem to some histori- ans, if he also worked with his hands in various crafts, as has been documented of many other princes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including his own great-grandfather Maximilian I, whose splendid working bench and 40 Seebach/Schreiber 1989, p. 376, ‘Bauphase v’; of course there may have been other reasons to raise this garden: lying at the bottom of the ridge, it may have been waterlogged in au- tumn and winter.