Page - 570 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 11570 On the other hand Strada may have had some sympathy for the Reforma- tion: as we have seen, he maintained contacts with many Protestants, and in particular with Italian Evangelical exiles, such as Mino Celsi and Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, Marchese di Oria—both of whom collaborated on his edition of Serlio’s Settimo Libro—the printer Pietro Perna in Basel and the humanist Lodovico Castelvetro, whose translation of Aristotle Strada sold and may have been instrumental in publishing. The extent of such sympathy is in- dicated by his attempt to enlist Antun Vrančić to provide counsel and support to Girolamo Donzellini, in order to help Donzellini to return to Italy and clear himself with the Holy Office.50 Summing up, a preliminary conclusion could be that Strada participated to some extent in the confessional debate of his time. He had both lived in a largely Protestant environment in Germany and moved in the circle of prelates who represented or at least tried to formulate the Catholic response to the Reformation, in Rome in the 1550s. In contrast to Hans Jakob Fugger, whose orthodoxy was never doubted notwithstanding his ample patronage of Prot- estant scholars, Strada must have expressed his doubts about ‘le cose Romane’ sufficiently often and openly to have attracted the attention of the Inquisition. Taken altogether, it seems likely that Strada may have shared a certain confes- sional leniency with his patron, Maximilian ii. 11.6 Contacts with Members of the Dynasty Together with Strada’s erudition, his curiosity and his enthusiasm, it was per- haps also his moderation in the confessional field that gained him Maximil- ian’s sympathy: a sympathy which was expressed in the Emperor’s enduring patronage, and which is reflected in Strada’s own letters.51 There is little or no evidence of a direct contact with Empress Maria and the members of her own immediate circle, but other members of the dynasty did frequent his house— or at least wrote their motto in his ‘memoria di casa mia’.52 Chief among 50 On these contacts, see above, Ch. 11.4; on Donzellini, see Jacobson Schutte 1992. 51 Maximilian’s intervention with the Duke of Mantua in the affair of Paolo Strada’s ben- efice in Mantua Cathedral is a case in point, involving an explicit motu proprio to Duke Guglielmo, impressed by an accompanying letter by no less a personage as Vratislav z Pernštejn, the Bohemian Chancellor, and presented to the Duke in person by Paolo Emilio Bardelone, the Mantuan envoy at the Imperial court (Docs. 1565-05-12 and 1565-05-15). 52 It is difficult to say whether the rumour of Strada’s alleged heresy as reported back to him by Dani in 1576 circulated widely. In Mantua it remained alive, given the fact that in 1583 both Strada and his son Paolo, as canon of San Pietro, were burned in effigie as