Page - 632 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 13632 If Strada was prepared to invest so much money in these huge acquisitions of drawings, it can be assumed that he also regularly bought smaller quantities of drawings and even individual sheets by other masters. He must, for instance, have been particularly eager to acquire some works by Polidoro da Caravaggio, the artist who most perfectly matched the Antique, and by the master who most widely surpassed it, Michelangelo.5 Since Strada appears rarely to have annotated his drawings, it is well-nigh impossible to decide which individual sheets once may have belonged to his collection. But at least it is possible to list the various components of the collection as far as these can be inferred from these sources. It is not surprising that in his preface to Serlio’s treatise on architecture Stra- da particularly stressed the architectural designs included in his purchases; this does not, however, indicate that other types of drawings were less well represented, as has been suggested by Beket Bukovinská and Eliška Fučíková.6 Of course the architectural drawings predominated among the material he ac- quired from Serlio. According to Strada his acquisitions consisted not only of drawings by Serlio himself, but also of those by other masters that Serlio had collected during his long career both in Italy and in France. It is very likely that they included in particular those that he had inherited or copied from his friend and teacher, Baldassare Peruzzi. This material probably also included earlier Sienese material on architecture, such as drawings and texts by Peru- zzi’s compatriot, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, whose treatise was one of Ser- lio’s sources of inspiration, and upon whose technical designs Strada drew for his treatise on watermills, fountains and other technical inventions.7 And it included the various designs (or copies of these) from the circle of Bramante, Raphael and the Sangallo circle that were used by Serlio in the preparation of his treatise. Perhaps it was Serlio that had acquired the military treatise by 5 Polidoro da Caravaggio is not mentioned in the sources documenting Strada’s acquisitions and possessions; but the facade of the Palazzo Gaddi in Rome, decorated by Polidoro, was probably among the monuments he had documented in the 1550s. Drawings by or after Mi- chelangelo are mentioned among works offered from his collection by Ottavio Strada after his father’s death, as are some attributed to Parmigianino. Strada often took advantage of op- portunities of acquiring works of art, as is borne out by the ample collection of Dürer prints he acquired, probably during his residence at Nuremberg (all discussed below). 6 Bukovinská/Fučíková/Konečný 1984, p. 65. I cannot agree that Strada in the context of his preface to Serlio would necessarily have singled out Giulio’s goldsmith work designs, when he had already stated explicitly that he acquired all of the material (‘tutti li disegni’) that had remained in Raffaello Pippi’s hands. The stress on architecture is natural in the preface to an architectural treatise, and in any case the relevant passage is very brief. 7 On this treatise, see Marchis/Dolza 2002 (also including papers by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Dirk Jansen) and Dolza 2003.