Page - 619 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

6�9The Musaeum: Its Contents a survey Strada edited once he began, in the mid-1570s, to try and sell his house and collections in order to finance his publishing projects. So the list repre- sents a choice of those objects Strada could miss, and which he thought might most appeal to his prospective patrons. He would have circulated it among his patrons, hoping that one of them might be interested in acquiring the collec- tion as a whole, but ready to name a price for any individual object they might fancy.94 This implies that paintings mentioned in this document are not necessarily identical with those in either of the two separate collections of contemporary paintings Strada is reported by Stopio of having bought in the summer of 1567. Doubtless some of the paintings acquired on those occasions are included, but we cannot be certain even of that: Strada may have acquired paintings on other occasions and in other locations Stopio knew nothing about, and there is no reason to suppose that he stopped buying pictures after he left Venice, or that he had never done so earlier. Yet since most of the paintings listed here are by Venetian artists, such as Giorgione, Titian and his son or nephew, Veronese, Bassano, Tintoretto and Frangipane, or by artists active in Venice, such as Sal- viati, it is likely that in fact Strada bought or even commissioned most of them during his visits to the Serenissima. 12.7.2 The Frick Allegories: A Strada Commission? That these paintings cannot be demonstrated all to have been part of Strada’s wholesale acquisitions in the summer of 1567 removes an obstacle to Duncan Bull’s hypothesis that the two Veronese allegories in the Frick collection were in fact commissioned by Strada directly from the artist. It is in any case rather implausible that such monumental paintings would have been made without a specific patron in mind. Bull suggests that they were made to complement the portraits of Jacopo himself by Titian, now in Vienna, and of his son Ottavio by Tintoretto, now in Amsterdam. Wisdom and Strength would then serve as an allegorical pendant to Titian’s portrait of the father, and The Choice between Virtue and Vice to Tintoretto’s portrait of the son.95 If so, the project was not 94 The earliest instance of this is his offer of both house and collections to Vilém z Rožmberk in the autumn of 1573. (Doc. 1573-12-18); his attempts discussed below, Ch.14,6. As argued above, the reference to the Kunstschrank and to Frangipane as a famous painter suggests a date for the list in the 1570s; the date does not need to correspond to the other documents in the relative volume of the Libri Antiquitatum, because Strada remained in contact with Duke Albrecht and Hans Jakob Fugger long after having concluded his acquisitions for the Antiquarium, and it is plausible that the Munich archivists, when putting the Libri Antiquitatum together, included material Strada sent later in this same file. 95 Bull 2009a, pp. 211–213.