Page - 618 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter ��6�8 masters such as Titian and Veronese were ‘weitberuembt’, ‘widely renowned’. Its presence in Munich does, however, indicate that Strada did hope that he might interest his Bavarian patrons in the acquisition of the entire collection or of some of its individual components. The list gives no indication at all of the provenance of the collection or of the individual works. Since Strada could offer it to the Duke, it was either a collection in his own possession or a collection to which he had privileged access. It lists forty-two paintings, mostly full-sized canvases, but also a few smaller items, and then continues with a not inconsiderable quantity of other materials, including some fat volumes of drawings and prints, some illustrated books, some coins and medals, some sculpture—mostly small bronzes—and some miscellaneous Kunstkammer items. What is perhaps the most fascinat- ing object in the list, a ‘Kunstschrank’ or cabinet of inlaid wood filled or deco- rated with antique marbles, allows to link the list more definitely to Strada. Its contents included two small antique marble heads of ‘2 khinder eins lacht / das andre waintt’. This relates the list to the earlier inventory of the Bussoni collection, which included ‘Capita duorum puerorum unus eorum qui ridet et alter qui ploret’: ‘the heads of two children, one of whom laughs, the other cries’. As we have seen above, that inventory, dated March 1562, is in Latin and commented in German; it is likewise preserved in Munich and can be associ- ated with Strada. The later presence of these sculptures in such a monumental cabinet—which would have taken some considerable time to have designed and made—is an argument that the document may be later in date than has been assumed on the basis of its presence among documents relating to Strada’s acquisitions for Duke Albrecht mostly dating from 1568–1570. An ad- ditional argument for a later dating is the adjective ‘weitberuembt’ or ‘widely famous, applied to the painter Niccolò Frangipane, one of Titian’s lesser pupils known to have been active only from 1563 onward. This suggests a date at the earliest in the early or mid-1570s. Most of the material included in the list—the antiquities, the coins and medals, the volumes of prints and drawings and the books on architecture and fortification—corresponds closely to what we know from other sources to have been in Strada’s collection. In his recent catalogue entry on the portraits of Jacopo and Ottavio Strada Duncan Bull has accepted Klara Garas’ and— following Garas—Xavier Salomon’s suggestion that the list is in fact an inven- tory of (part of) Strada’s own collection doubling as dealer’s stock’.93 This is indeed a most plausible explanation: the Munich list is one of several copies of 93 Garas 1990, p. 18; Campenhausen 2003, pp. 12 and 16–21; Salomon 2006, p. 22; Bull 2009a, p. 212.