Page - 463 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

463The Neugebäude In the second place his expertise and his huge collection of documentation provided inspiration, concrete examples and technical solutions, again both for the project as a whole and for individual components. Perhaps most impor- tant was that he could comment most of the drawings in his collection often on the basis of his own personal experience of the constructions they docu- mented. When the example was Antique, he could cite from his background knowledge of antiquarian and literary sources; when the model was modern he could comment on its raison d’être, its form and function, often on the basis of his personal acquaintance with the artists that had created, and sometimes even with the patrons that had commissioned it. Before attempting to indi- viduate what concrete features of the Neugebäude may be due to Strada, it is good to discuss some of the sources—both iconological and formal—that Maximilian and his architects could have seen in Strada’s Musaeum. I divide them into three sections: Ottoman, Ancient Roman and contemporary Italian architecture. 9.7 Ottoman Influence? Over the course of time the odd, mysterious, slightly lugubrious complex of the Neugebäude has given rise to several legends. Principal among these is the story that the gardens, laid out on the exact spot were Suleiman the Magnifi- cent had pitched his tents during his siege of Vienna in 1529, were intended as a reconstruction in stone of the Sultan’s sumptuous ‘Zeltburg’, the bivouac or camp that served as his headquarters and personal residence. This would ex- plain both the odd plan and the many towers topped by their tent-like pavilion roofs. In the first serious publication on the Neugebäude Albert Ilg discarded the story as a ridiculous fabrication, also because the earliest sources mention- ing it only date from the later seventeenth century.48 Renate Wagner-Rieger conceded that a direct imitation of Ottoman example was out of the question, but suggested that oriental culture might nevertheless have provided some 48 Ilg 1895. For a survey of the sources of the legend, see Lietzmann 1987, pp. 9–23; the earli- est mention she found is in Thomas Crowe, A True relation of all the Remarkable Places and Passages observed in the travels of the right honourable Thomas Lord Howard, London 1637 (reprint as Travels of Thomas Lord Howard, Amsterdam/ New York 1971), who reports Lord Arundel’s visit to Vienna in 1636, where he ‘went to see a garden of the Emperours a Dutch mile off, called Nigobath, upon which place the Turke once intrenched himself, when he would have taken Vienna, and was then two hundred thousand man strong, in the Emperour Rodolphus his time, an after they were driven out of the countrey, the Emperour built this on their works for a memorial’.