Page - 563 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

563Strada’s Circle printed [Fig.  11.22]. Here again the advice and recommendations such scholars were willing to give him doubtless reflect the services he had rendered them earlier. Some years later, in 1581, a young polyglot scholar from Saxony, Elias Hutter, when passing through Vienna not only appears to have visited Strada, but also offered himself to convey another request for subvention for Strada’s publish- ing projects to his patron, the Elector August of Saxony. It is not known what was the result of his intervention, but his presence shows that Strada’s efforts were taken seriously also by a younger generation.34 Even when there is no concrete written evidence, it can be assumed that Strada was also in contact with the scholars and artists more or less perma- nently employed at Maximilian’s court and thus often resident in Vienna, whom he must have regularly met when discharging his duties at court, such as the Imperial physicians Pier Andrea Mattioli and Joannes Crato, the botanist Carolus Clusius, the physician, historian and emblematist Iohannes Sambucus, and the composer and Kapellmeister Philips de Monte [Figs. 11.24–11.27]. Strada was very much aware of the lustre the presence such luminaries afforded the Imperial court, and was proud to be associated with them, as he had expressed to Ferdinand i in his very first bid for Imperial patronage: ‘Hora se la Maestà Vostra li piace di acetarmi nel numero de li suoi virtuosi, del canto mio farò 34 Doc. 1581-01-04. Hutter was born in 1553; his interest in Strada’s linguistic materials, in particular the polyglot dictionary, is not surprising in view of his own project to produce a polyglot bible, a first instalment of which, a New Testament in no less than twelve lan- guages, was published in Nuremberg in 1599. Figure 11.21 Rembertus Dodonaeus, woodcut from his Cruijdeboeck, 1554. Figure 11.23 Christophe Plantin, engraving by Hendrick Goltzius. Figure 11.22 Hugo Blotius, anonymous portrait medal, ca 1593.