Page - 598 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter ��598 basis for the sets of splendid numismatic drawings he made for Hans Jakob Fugger and his other patrons. That these were serious studies is borne out by the verbal descriptions with which Strada intended to accompany them, preserved in two bulky sets of manuscript volumes in Vienna and in Prague, the A(ureum) A(rgentum) A(eneum) NumismatΩn Διαςκευέ, i.e. a ‘Description of gold, silver and bronze antique coins’. Because in these entries he always mentioned the collection where he had seen the best exemplar, it is possible to reconstruct at least part—and probably the best part—of his own collection, and to compare it with those of some of his contemporaries. From this it results that, at least as to its size, Strada’s description of his own coin cabinet is overly modest: except for those possessed by Antonio Agustín, Strada’s own medals are most often used as the source for his descriptions. Even taking into account that Strada would have had a bias for his own coins, or that he may have possessed relatively many rare issues of which he had seen no other exemplars, one can conclude that his collection must have consisted of at the very least about two thousand coins, and probably many, many more.50 50 A[ureorum] A[rgenteorum] A[ereorum] Numismatωn Antiquorum Διασκευέ, Vienna, Uni- versitätsbibliothek, Ms iii—160898 (old shelf mark iii 483); Prague, University library, ms. vii A 1. It is discussed in Jansen 1993, pp. 215–220; some examples of the descriptions and the breakdown of the provenance of the coins listed in the first five volumes, ibidem, annex 1a, pp. 227–230 and 1b, pp. 231–232. These five volumes (out of eleven) describe a total of 4430 coins, owned by about 50 different collectors: Agustín (942 entries) and Strada (883 entries) each correspond to about a fifth of this total. This does not neces- sarily imply the other collections were smaller or of lesser quality, but it does imply that Strada had studied these two collections in greater depth. All the same it is clear that Strada possessed a huge collection of coins; so his note in his letter to Jacopo Dani of 1581 ‘le mie medaglie, le quali, se ben non son molte, sonno però exquisitissime’ (Doc. 1581-11- 02) probably indicates that by that time he had already sold a large part of them to one or more of his patrons, but had kept the best ones for himself. The Διασκευέ would make it Figure ��.�9 Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Strada [Fig. 01], detail showing antique coins. Figure ��.�0 Tintoretto, Portrait of Ottavio Strada [Fig. 0.2], detail showing a cornuco- pia showering a profusion of antique coins.