Page - 464 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter 9464 inspiration for the Neugebäude, as it did for various festivals at court. She was the first to attribute the design to Jacopo Strada, and pointed to his apparent knowledge of the Near East, suggesting that he even may have visited Con- stantinople. In his small monograph on the Neugebäude Rupert Feuchtmüller largely followed Ilg, discarding any possible Ottoman influence.49 In contrast Hilda Lietzmann took the legend as point of departure for her detailed and carefully documented study, and referred to it in its title. She pointed out that the Turks themselves did recognize Suleiman’s bivouac in the Neugebäude, witness the romanticized travel journal of Evliya Çelebi, who vis- ited Vienna in 1665.50 Lietzmann indicated some typological sources in Cairo and Istanbul, but also suggested a direct derivation from Suleiman’s actual encampment, documentation of which was in Strada’s possession. Unfortu- nately neither this nor any other similar material has been preserved or identi- fied, so Lietzmann can show little convincing evidence. Of course she uses the print of Kara Mustafa’s tent, among the spoils captured after the 1683 siege, merely to explain how by the second half of the seventeenth century even people in Europe could actually recognize a Turkish tent in the Neugebäude. Lietzmann’s contention has not found much acceptance—in Vienna itself it is contradicted or, more often, ignored.51 It is true that there are no contemporary sources explicitly linking the Neugebäude and Suleiman’s headquarters, but in view of the extreme scanti- ness of contemporary documentation on the raison d’être of the building that can hardly be taken as evidence that such a link has not existed. And in view of the importance of the Ottoman Empire and the memory of the 1529 siege for Maximilian’s politics, it seems plausible that the fact that he constructed his Lusthaus exactly on the spot were Suleiman had pitched his tent would have had some special significance for the Emperor, in which case it well might have influenced its appearance in some ways. 49 Rieger 1951; Feuchtmüller 1976. 50 Lietzmann 1987, pp. 14–16. During the 1683 siege of Vienna the Turkish commander Kara Mustafa or his entourage explicitly linked the Neugebäude with Suleiman’s camp, reason why he forbade his soldiers to plunder and damage it, this in contrast to other imperial castles and villas around Vienna. 51 Zimmermann 1987 does not refer to the Bausage at all; Wehdorn 2004, p. 10, merely men- tions, but does not discuss it. Lippmann 2006–2007, p. 160 holds that the occidental idiom of its forms, classical (or ‘antique’) for the arcades, contemporary (or ‘modern’) for the upper gardens, precludes any wish to refer to Turkish culture and traditions. In September 2010 the present author attended a long, competently guided tour of the building: though this was very interesting, the 1529 siege was never mentioned, let alone the location of Suleiman’s camp and its possible influence on the Neugebäude.