Page - 611 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

6��The Musaeum: Its Contents by Correggio, the School of Love (now in the National Gallery in London, and the Venus, Cupid and Satyr (now in the Louvre), that at the time were still in the collection of Count Federico Maffei [Figs. 12.27 and 12.28].81 Most important, however, were the copies of a number of paintings from the Camerino dei Cesari. Here Strada had copied for the Duke not the famous portraits of the eleven first Roman Emperors painted by Titian, as has been assumed, but instead the scenes from their lives, one ‘Historia’ for each, that Giulio Romano and his assistants had painted to go under the portraits them- selves [Figs. 12.29–12.30]; and likewise the smaller paintings, depicting the 81 Cf. the letter of ‘Il Cerragagno, Stopio’s Mantuan informer and Strada’s autograph note ‘Pitture che fo fare imitare’, included in BHStA-LA 4852, fol. 176 and printed in Verhey- en 1967, p. 64, n.31. Giulio’s ‘Dea della natura’ is mentioned in the 1627 inventory of the Gonzaga collections (Luzio 1913/1974, p. 115). Guido Rebecchini has discovered that the Correggio paintings are listed in a 1589 inventory of the collection of Count Federico Maf- fei, who had died in 1586 (Rebecchini 1997, pp. 274–275); this implies that they had not been commissioned by Isabella d’Este or her son Duke Federico, as has generally been assumed; cf. Verheyen 1967, p. 64; Gould 1976, pp. 213–216 and 238–239. Figures ��.�7–��.�8 Antonio del Correggio, The School of Love (London, National Gallery) and Venus, Cupid and Satyr (Paris, Musée du Louvre).