Page - 557 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

557Strada’s Circle During this visit Dani must at least have heard and probably have seen something of Strada’s plans for his grand new house, the plot of which he had just acquired. In any case it can be assumed that Dani visited Strada at home during both his visits, since the letters they later exchanged explicitly under- line their friendship. This is not surprising because Dani shared Strada’s anti- quarian interests, possessing a manuscript with finished drawings of antique altars, sarcophaguses and their inscriptions copied after designs by Giovanni Antonio Dosio [Fig. 11.15].17 This volume provides another link to Strada: in an album of Dosio’s drawings in Berlin, which provided some of the models for Dani’s collection, an annotation tells the reader that ‘all the objects marked with little crosses had been copied on behalf of M[esse]r Jacopo Strada’. And in fact several drawings are found copied both in Dani’s album and in Strada’s Statuarum antiquarum in Vienna [Figs. 11.15 and 11.16].18 Jacopo Dani also possessed a copy of Strada’s own Epitome Thesauri Antiq- uitatum, doubtless directly acquired from its author [Fig. 11.17].19 So it is not surprising that he was happy to hear from a compatriot returning to Florence in 1573 that Strada was doing well, ‘having finished your beautiful building, and accommodated your children and your affairs’. If he could provide such de- tailed information, Dani’s informer, Antonio Girolami, a Florentine merchant resident in Vienna, must have been an acquaintance of Strada himself.20 Another learned diplomat among Strada’s early acquaintance in Vienna was Bernardin Bochetel, Bishop of Rennes, who was sent to the Imperial court in 1562 as French Ambassador to negotiate a possible marriage between the Dauphin Charles and one of Maximilian’s young daughters. Bochetel had been 17 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, N.A. 1159, discussed in Rubinstein 1989 and in- tegrally published in Casamassima/ Rubinstein 1993; the drawings possibly by Battista Naldini (ivi, p. xxii). 18 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79 D 1, fol. 8v., quoted in Hülsen 1933, p.7,: ‘Tutti quegli ch(e) avran(n)o u[na + / p(er) contrassegno so(n) fatti [per mr.] / Jac(omo) Strada. Lo fo a causa [che non si / pigl(i) errore.’ Cf. Tedeschi Grisanti 1983, p. 70; Amadio 1988, p. 39; Casamas- sima/Rubinstein 1993, p. xii; this shows that Strada himself had acquired such drawings from Dosio when in Rome in the 1550s, and suggests that Dani may have obtained his album through Strada’s mediation. Five of the drawings in his own ms album Statuarum antiquarum (Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. min 21,2) correspond to drawings in Dani’s album (ibi- dem, pp. 155–156). 19 The copy of the Epitome Thesauri Antiquitatum carrying Dani’s owner’s mark on its title page was offered for sale by Antiquariat Wolfgang Braecklein, Berlin, in the Autumn of 2011, a description was found on the internet: http://www.zvab.com/displayBookDetails. do?itemId=141548677&b=1 (8 October 2011). I am grateful to Mr Braecklein for sending me a photograph. For a brief biography of Dani, see Vivoli 1986. 20 Doc. 1573-05-27. The website of the Medici Archive Project, bia.medici.org (consulted 01–08–2017), provides extracts of some documents referring to Antonio Girolami, who died indebted in the late summer of 1591.