Page - 542 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

Chapter 10542 place because there are few—if any—other architects in the region to whom it could plausibly be attributed; but also because its style is quite close to what one could expect from Strada on the basis of his architectural background— Mantua, Giulio and Serlio—and of the little we know of his architectural prac- tice, in particular his drawings for the Munich Antiquarium and the design of his own house in Vienna. 10.7 Conclusion The exact significance of Jacopo Strada’s position as Imperial Architect is very difficult to determine with certainty, chiefly because it appears that he was hardly—if ever—employed as an executive architect or master mason actu- ally supervising the construction of his projects. There is little concrete infor- mation even on his role as a designer, which is documented only for the Mu- nich Antiquarium and an unspecified section of the Vienna Neugebäude, and is self-evident in the case of his own house. Moreover Strada himself hardly presented himself as an architect: he preferred to sign with his title as Impe- rial Antiquary, and even in his Serlio edition he did not present himself as an architect or builder, but merely implied that he was capable of editing Serlio’s drawings ‘because of the familiarity I have with his things’. Though well aware of the importance of constructive and technical aspects of building and quite adept at practical detailing in an architectural design, as the Antiquarium de- sign makes abundantly clear, it is obvious that he did not consider himself a builder or contractor. It is unlikely that he ever acted as such, except in the case of his own house. It was only towards the end of his career, when his other activities had became less lucrative, that he explicitly solicited for architec- tural commissions, first with the Elector August of Saxony, and later with Arch- duke Ernest, as governor of Lower and Upper Austria for his brother, Emperor Rudolf ii. In neither case there is evidence that his attempts were successful, though in view of the type of services he offered, this absence of documenta- tion does not necessarily imply that they were not. Advice given, a sketch or even a worked-out design made at an informal request, an expert coaching given to a fellow court-architect in the guise of collegial consultation are not things that necessarily are recorded on paper.42 42 Hilda Lietzmann 1997 exhaustively presents the evidence of Strada’s contact with the Dresden court, and makes a quite convincing case that Strada did not get very far with Elector August, who had just appointed a new, young Italian architect, Giovanni Maria Nosseni. But here again we only know what happened before Strada actually met the Elector in person. For Strada’s approach to Archduke Ernest in 1579, cf. above, Ch. 4.4.1; it is not unlikely that the Archduke did occasionally employ him even in the 1580s: as a