Page - 536 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter 10536 were neighbours: Strein lived on the site of the present Palais Starhemberg, across the Vordere Schenkengasse, almost opposite Strada.33 That they did have contact on scholarly topics is clear from the fact that it was Strein who, in June 1573, presented Strada’s request for letters of recommendation from the Emperor to various princes of the Empire, to induce them to subsidize the huge scholarly publishing programme he was setting up.34 Strein may well have been willing to promote Strada’s scholarly projects in other ways. Thus it may have been through his recommendation that Strada came in contact with Henricus Glareanus and François Hotman, two of the teachers Strein had studied with, and whom he highly praises in the preface of his De gentibus. With Aldus Manutius the younger and Fulvio Orsini, whom Strada knew through his presence or contacts in Venice and Rome, these two outstanding scholars contributed to the first complete edition of Caesar’s Com- mentaries, which Strada intended to publish in France, and for which he ob- tained a copyright privilege of King Charles ix on Christmas day of 1572.35 If they shared such interests and enthusiasm, it is obvious that—once Strein began planning architectural projects—he would have recourse to the documentation in his neighbour’s Musaeum and to his expertise in this field. And Strein was planning architectural projects almost all the time: his family was very wealthy, and he and his brothers together owned and sometimes re- built something close to twenty-five castles and country houses in Lower Aus- tria and Moravia.36 Reichard Strein’s principal seat was the huge castle of Freidegg in Ferschnitz in Lower Austria, which he had almost completely reconstructed between 1575 and 1594 [Fig. 10.36]. Almost nothing of all this remains; the Streins died out in the seventeenth century and there are no family archives documenting the genesis of this or the other projects undertaken by Reichard. Nevertheless one of his creations is still standing, the ancestral seat from which he derived his 33 Grossmann 1927. 34 Doc. 1573-06-00, Strada to the Imperial Vice-Chancellor Weber: ‘Io creddo che la Signoria Vostra avera auto la mia suplica che’l Signor Strain à mandato avanti hieri alla Signoria Vostra’. On this project, see Jansen 2004, pp. 184–185 and below, Ch. 14. 35 On this edition, printed in Frankfurt in 1575, see Jansen 2004, pp. 189–191 and below, Ch. 14.5.3. 36 Recently discussed in Alena Skrabanek’s outstanding master-thesis dedicated to the architecture of Ungarschitz/ Uherčice, the one substantial estate the Strein family owned in Moravia: Skrabanek 2008, esp. pp. 35–38 ‘Exkurs: Genealogie und Herrschafts- struktur der Streun von Schwarzenau’ and pp. 39–40 ‘Exkurs: Nebensitze der Streun in Niederösterreich’.