Page - 578 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter ��578 I also possess a beautiful choice of antique medals, together with a book of drawings of them, which begins at the reign of Nerva and ends at that of Alexander Severus, the son of Julia Mammea. This book was judged by Pope Julius del Monte [Pope Julius iii], my patron, and by all the Cardinals that saw it at that time, the most beautiful and made with the greatest judgment they had ever seen. The same was thought in France and in Germany; the most excellent Lord Duke of Ferrara, when he found himself in my house together with Count Francesco da Novel- lara likewise confirmed the opinion of the other Princes mentioned here. In my library there are thirteen big volumes of descriptions of medals that have been seen by me wherever I have been in the world: they count over twelve thousand descriptions. There are also seven big volumes of antique inscriptions that I have collected, and lately I have added to them those [found] in Turkey, in Egypt and in Hungary, and in all the lands [now] occupied by the Turks. At present in my house is written a Dictionary of eleven languages, which is a task at which I have laboured for eighteen years, during which I always have maintained people at work at it. These are the languag- es: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Spanish, French, German and Italian; and at the appropriate places I insert [im- ages of] the medals, marble statues, epitaphs, and whatever else it is pos- sible to show in pictures. Many other things I have here, which in great part have been seen by those gentlemen from the court of Your Excellency that have passed by here; which, in order not to take up any more of your time, I do not want to mention all here. All these things I offer to Your Excellency; should you wish to avail yourself of this, I am at your command; and when my books will be finished Your Excellency will have his part of them. A few years later Strada offered to present his collections, which he indicated as his ‘khunstkamer’ to the Elector August of Saxony, as a gift in exchange for a pension for himself and his children. For this he gave two reasons: on the one hand because, at his advanced age, he was often subject to diseases and he was afraid that after his death his collection might end up in the wrong hands; on the other hand because he hoped that work on the immense illustrated dic- tionary he was preparing could thus continue under the aegis of the Elector.4 He gave a brief description which is worth quoting: 4 The letter only survives in a German translation made at the Dresden court: Doc. 1575-09-28, published and first commented in Lietzmann 1997 (Dokument 2), pp. 396–397.