Page - 496 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter 9496 between two gardens, one of which is enclosed within crenelated walls, sur- rounded partly or wholly by covered walkways, and decorated by statuary: in Genoa at least two white marble fountains were already in situ at the time of Maximilian’s visit.97 Both buildings were—0r were planned to be—very richly decorated: the Palazzo del Principe by one of Raphael’s favourite pupils, Peri- no del Vaga. Commenting on the decoration and furnishing Andrea Doria had prepared for the visit of Charles v in 1533, Ludovico da Bagno, the Mantuan ambassador, told Isabelle d’Este that ‘the said decoration is not that of a noble- man, but rather of a great king’.98 The richly planted gardens of the Palazzo del Principe and others in Genoa, favoured as they were by the extraordinary mild climate of the Italian Riviera, also must have made a big impression on Maximilian, who had never seen anything similar before. They were singled out for particular praise in Ludovico da Bagno’s letter, who thought the Geno- ese gardens were so beautiful that ‘it seems to me that being born in Genoa much obliges its inhabitants to Nature’.99 Thanks to Charles v’s visit, Andrea Doria’s splendid villa was well known at the Vienna court even before Maximilian’s own visits: we have seen how Ferdinand asked his architect Paolo della Stella to bring back drawings or a model of it from Genoa, which influenced the appearance of the summer palace he had built in the gardens of the castle at Prague. This model prob- ably was still available in Prague or Vienna.100 Moreover, if Maximilian would have wished to refresh his memories, he could have recourse to Jacopo Strada. Though we have no positive evidence that Strada visited Genoa, this is not unlikely: if he had not visited it during his peregrinations in his youth, he may have passed it when he travelled from Lyon to Rome in 1553. In any case he 97 Particularly interesting is the galleried hall providing a splendid ceremonial space pro- truding from the garden out unto the quay edging the shore: consisting of an open arcade above a closed podium, which possibly inspired the more ambitious, though not more monumental principal arcade of the Neugebäude. Its position and its concept remind one of the monumental arcade at Split: could Andrea Doria, familiar as he was with the shores of the Mediterranean, have known Split and have used it as an example? A splen- did portal in the rustic zone under the loggia opens unto a breakwater or jetty thrown out into the water, so possibly it also functioned as a ceremonial entrance: Doria’s flagship and the state galley he had had built on purpose for Maximilian’s and Philip’s 1548 visit could be anchored there. 98 ‘dicto apparato non e da un gentilhomo, ma da un gran Re’, quoted in Gorse 1986, p. 322. 99 Ibidem: ‘ogni di andanno in brevibus a veder giardini, che son tanto belli che me par ch’el esser nasciuto a Genova oblighi molto li habitanti alla natura’. 100 Cf. above, Ch. 5.2.1. When Maximilian asked his agent in Genoa, Marc Antonio Spinola, for drawings and models of gardens and pleasure houses, he probably expected material relating to projects dating from after his own last visit.