Page - 614 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter ��6�4 Linking these drawings with the plan for the construction of the Munich An- tiquarium that at the time were being developed, Verheyen suggests that Duke Albrecht intended to have a more or less exact replica built of the Palazzo del Te, pointing out that otherwise there would have been no need to have noted the measurements so precisely in the drawings.86 Such an assumption may have been plausible in the case of the Camerino dei Cesari: after all here copies of all its constituent parts—except for the ceiling fresco—were in the Duke’s possession, and to realize a replica of this one room would have required little further expense and even less space. It is also true that Strada himself shortly afterwards suggested that the octagonal ceiling panels from the Sala di Psiche in the Palazzo del Te should be copied, so as to incorporate these copies within the ceiling of the large rectangular room or hall above the Antiquarium that was to house Albrecht’s library. But because of the completely different pro- portions of the two spaces, it is clear in this case that a strict imitation of the Sala di Psiche was never intended.87 And whatever the intended destination of the copies after the paintings in the Camerino dei Cesari, these ended up an in- tegral part of a numerous collection of portraits of rulers and prelates housed in a quite large room of the Munich Kunstkammer.88 If the reconstruction of such a small room as the Camerino dei Cesari was deemed impracticable, it can safely be excluded that the idea of imitating a complete palace or even only part of it ever crossed the mind of Albrecht V or his advisers. The credit for the precision of the drawings, and the inclusion of its exact measurements, should rather be given to Strada’s perfectionism and to his intention to have them published one day; this interest ties this commission immediately to his own collection of graphic documentation, which will be discussed in greater detail below. As splendid objects providing detailed information on a monument of international renown, they fitted seamlessly into the concept of the complex of collections being realized at Munich, the raison d’être of which had been so carefully set out in Samuel Quiccheberg’s treatise on collecting published two years earlier: no further justification for their acquisition by Duke Albrecht is necessary. 86 Verheyen 1967, pp. 64–66. 87 BHStA-LA 4853, fols. 27 and 60; Von Busch 1973, pp. 127–128. 88 As described in Johan Baptist Fickler’s inventory dating from 1598, publishd in Diemer 2004 and exhaustively commented in Diemer/Diemer/Sauerländer 2008, 2, nrs 2599, 2617, 2625, 2631, 2638, 2645, 2652, 2659, 2666, 2675, 2682 (portraits), 2600, 2610, 2618, 2626, 2632, 2639, 2646, 2653, 2660, 2667, 2676, 2683 (scenes); comment on pp. 749–753, and in the sep- arate article by Dorothea Diemer, ‘Mantua in Bayern? Eine Planungsepisode der Münch- ner Kunstkammer’, ibidem, 3, pp. 320–329; they had been earlier discussed in Hartig 1933a, pp. 207–211 and Jansen 1987, pp. 14–15.