Page - 593 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

593The Musaeum: Its Contents are placed on the table[Figs. 12.8 and 12.12] and a slightly larger sized Hercules of the Farnese type in bronze, placed on the shelf above Strada’s head, is cut off by the upper edge of the painting [Fig. 12.11]. In Tintoretto’s portrait of Ottavio Strada, painted at the same time, the subject is clutching a small fragmentary metal statuette in one hand[Fig. 12.13], while leaning on a life size, nude Goddess—doubtless a Venus—of white marble [Fig. 12.10]. One should beware of trying to identify these exact objects: the odds are that they are figments of the artist’s imagination, as is the case with Tintoretto’s Venus, which has much more in common with Alessandro Vittoria’s style than with that of Greek or Roman sculpture. But they do represent the type of mate- rial Strada would have collected in his Musaeum. The only individual items we know to have been in Strada’s collection are the probably small-sized antiques incorporated in a Kunstschrank described in the inventory of paintings and some other works of art that Strada offered at some point in time to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, which will be discussed in greater detail below. Principal items were the portrait heads of Philip of Mace- don, of his son Alexander the Great and of Hannibal; a female head identified as ‘Capuana’; and the heads of two children, ‘one laughing, the other crying’, all in marble. The cabinet moreover contained a number of other small an- tiquities: a bust of Faustina in marble, and one of Minerva in ‘metal’, prob- Figures ��.8–��.9 Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Strada [Fig. 0.1], details showing the marble statuette of Venus and a male torso. Figure ��.�0 Tintoretto, Portrait of Ottavio Strada [Fig. 0.2], detail showing the life size Venus in white marble.