Page - 613 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

6�3The Musaeum: Its Contents At first sight it seems therefore that Albrecht V intended to recreate in some way the entire Camerino dei Cesari within the walls of his own residence. This is not quite as surprising as it may seem: the Bavarian branch of the Wittel- sbach had already much earlier demonstrated their interest in the artistic achievements of their Gonzaga relatives. As discussed in chapter 2.3, after a visit to Mantua in 1536 Albrecht’s uncle, Duke Ludwig X, had had built his town palace in Landshut after designs by Giulio Romano, by artists and craftsmen from Mantua specially engaged for the purpose. Albrecht knew this complex very well, since he resided at Landshut until his accession to the Duchy in 1550. That his own interest in Mantua’s secular architecture extended beyond the Camerino dei Cesari—which after all might have appealed to him merely for its iconography and the great name of the principal artist involved—is dem- onstrated by his acquiring the additional documentary material that Strada brought from Mantua. Among these was a model of the Palazzo del Te Strada had commissioned from ‘the architect of Don Cesare Gonzaga’, probably Fran- cesco Capriani da Volterra.84 12.6.2 Documentary Drawings Moreover Strada commissioned the young Mantuan painter Ippolito Andreasi to prepare detailed measured drawings of the exterior as well as of the interior decoration of all the principal rooms of the Palazzo del Te and of some of the rooms in the Palazzo Ducale, among which the Camerino dei Cesari and the Sala di Troia. The model has been lost, but the drawings ended up in the print room of the Düsseldorf Kunstmuseum, where they were first signalled by Egon Verheyen in 1966. In 1984 Richard Harprath correctly identified their draughts- man, and included them in his catalogue raisonné of Andreasi’s drawings. They were quite extensively used in the research preparing the ground-breaking ex- hibition on Giulio Romano in the Palazzo del Te in 1987. A selection of them was shown there in conjunction with the room by room description of the Palazzo del Te with which Strada had complemented the set of drawings, thus deliberately constituting a body of documentation that remains of consider- able importance for a good understanding of the monument.85 84 The material mentioned in Strada’s final account, BHStA-LA 4853, fols. 11–21, printed in Stockbauer 1874, p. 32–36, the drawings p. 34. 85 On these drawings, see Verheyen 1967 and Verheyen 1977, passim; they are catalogued in Harprath 1984, pp. 3–28 and in part illustrated, plates 4–13. Strada’s description of the Palazzo del Te is in Vienna, onb-hs, Cod. 9039, fols. 57–58; its text published in Verheyen 1967, pp. 68–69. Both description and drawings are included and discussed in Amedeo Belluzzi’s monumental monograph on the Palazzo del Te (Belluzzi 1998, Saggi, pp. 30–36 and passim).