Page - 564 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 11564 ogni debito per farmi honore’. Unfortunately Strada is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the correspondence of these well-known personalities. Nevertheless one of his associates, the German neo-Latin poet Paul Schede, also known as Paulus Melissus, who spent several years at Maximilian’s court and served him as an ambassador, was sufficiently impressed to give Strada a highly laudatory entry in his Schediasmata poetica, a fat book of Latin poems in praise of the men of letters and learning of his time [Fig. 11.30 and 11.31–11.32].35 35 Melissus 1586, p. 283; on Melissus, see Fechner/Dehnhard 1994. Figures 11.24–11.29 Some luminaries employed at Maximilian’s court that Strada regularly rubbed shoulders with: the physician, natural historian and poet Pier Andrea Mattioli; the physician and humanist Joannes Crato; the bota- nist Carolus Clusius, the historian and emblematist Johannnes Sambu- cus and the court composer Philips de Monte; only François Hotman Strada probably met elsewehere. All engravings by Theodor de Bry from Jean Jacques Boissard’s Icones Quinquaginta Virorum illustrium doctrina et eruditione praestantium ad vivum effictae, cum eorum vitis descriptis (1597–1599).