Page - 600 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter ��600 Fine craftsmanship was represented by a silver crucifix, a looking glass in a richly decorated gilt frame and a black marble basin.53 Of special interest is a tabletop—which came provided with a finely wrought base—executed in the technique often indicated as commesso di pietre dure, a term that was lit- erally translated into German in the account: ‘1 Tisch mit zusammengesetzten Steinen’. Apart from these finished specimens of the technique, Strada also bought a quite considerable quantity of semiprecious stones.54 These may have been intended merely as raw material for the manufacture of similar objects by the Duke’s own artists, but it is also thinkable that at least the larger plaques were meant to be used in interior decoration, in particular of the Munich Antiquar- ium itself. Such a display of rare and precious sorts of marble, many of which came from Greece and Asia Minor, had been realized in those rooms of his palace at Santa Maria Formosa in Venice where Giovanni Grimani, Patriarch of Aquileia, housed his collection of antiquities. This was very famous at the time and well known both to Stopio and to Strada himself.55 [Fig. 12.21] Finally part of the stones may have been acquired for the Duke’s Kunstkammer by virtue of their mineralogical interest, such as the fossilized piece of wood and the thirty- four balls (‘Kugeln’) of ‘all sorts of rare and oriental stones’.56 Certainly intended for the Kunstkammer were the various items of archaeo- logical, historical or ethnological interest that Strada provided: in the first place the numerous ancient coins and medals, including those from the Lore- dan collection, but also two cameos or intaglios, either antique or at least ‘all’ 53 BHStA-LA 4853, fols. 11–21; Stockbauer 1874, p. 33: ‘1 silbernes Crucifix v 30. <…> 1 runde länglichte Schale von schwartzen Stein sammt 2 anderen Steinen v 30 f 4 st 10’; p. 34: ‘1 Spiegel mit vergoldeten Angesichtern v 6’. 54 BHStA-LA 4853, fols. 11–21; Stockbauer 1874, p. 33: ‘1 Tisch mit zusammengesetzten Steinen und feinem ausgearbeiteten Fuss v. 80’; the pieces of semiprecious stones listed pp. 33–34. 55 BHStA-LA 4852, fol. 150; Stopio to Fugger, 22 February 1568: ‘Io haveva invitato il Strada <…>ma l’ha mandato ad scusare, che ha tanto da fare tutto il dì con il patriarca che a pena ha tempo da mangiare<…>’. Stopio also knew the Palazzo Grimani and its collections, and sent a design of its ‘tribuna’ to Munich, cf. above, Ch. 8; on the Palazzo Grimani, see Perry 1981; Tafuri 1985, pp. 15–17 and figs. 7–10; Bristot 2008. The palace and its restoration were the subject of a colloquium, Il Palazzo e le collezioni Grimani a S. Maria Formosa, Venice, 4–5 October 1985; on its marble decorations a communication was made by L. Lazzarini, ‘I marmi di Palazzo Grimani’. It is now a museum. 56 Strada also ordered stone slabs for the inscriptions for (the bases of) the statues, as re- ported in his letter from Mantua to Duke Albrecht: ‘De li tavole di paragone ne ordinaro a la suma di cento, computando le prime, le quali in mia absenza si metranno a la fine, e lassaro buon ordine che si mandaranno’. (Doc. 1567-07-12); they cannot be the stones mentioned in Strada’s account, for these were all coloured, whereas ‘pietra di paragone’ is a black marble.