Page - 640 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 13640 Duke. It was obviously not identical with the parcel of two hundred and forty unbound drawings actually sent to, and returned from Tuscany, which perhaps Ottavio did not risk to expose a second time to the judgment of an Italian con- noisseur. In this he was not ill-advised, in view of Visconti’s quite sceptical re- action to the material Ottavio did propose to him. The Count did not wish to retain any of this for himself, but he did send Ottavio’s letter to Florence: the Grand Duke might find something to his taste, though Visconti did not really expect that, noting in his covering letter that: <…>benchè quanto a me, io credo che a portare tali cose a Fiorenza sia portare a Samo vasi, nottole a Attene, e cocodrilli a Egitto. <…>As far as I am concerned, I believe bringing such things to Florence is like bringing vases to Samos, owls to Athens, and crocodiles to Egypt.25 In view of his disappointment at the earlier consignment of Ottavio’s drawings it is perhaps not surprising that the Grand Duke did not show any interest, and Ottavio had to look elsewhere for buyers. Ottavio’s correspondence as found in Florence contains no further referenc- es to his father’s drawings, and it will be convenient once more to sum up what the written sources list as items from Jacopo’s Musaeum. The list of paintings and other works of art probably sent to the Munich court by Strada himself includes two items: 1. Five books or albums of various sorts of ‘good engraved works of art’, and 2. One small chest containing many large and small copper engravings These may or may not have been in part identical with two of the items men- tioned in Ottavio’s correspondence with the Tuscan court, with the Duke of Bracciano, and with Prospero Visconti: 3. A volume containing two hundred and sixteen prints by Albrecht Dürer. This was offered by Ottavio to Grand Duke Ferdinando i of Tuscany and to Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, and later to Prospero Visconti. 4. A copy of Dürer’s Ehrenpforte (if complete that would be hundred and ninety two sheets in all). 5. A set of three hundred prints by (mostly) Italian Renaissance masters. This was bound as a companion volume to the Dürer prints, and included works by or after Michelangelo, Raphael, Parmigianino, and Giulio Roma- no, but also by Lucas van Leyden, and was bound as a companion volume 25 asf, Medici del Principato 825, fol. 317, Prospero Visconti to Marcello Accolti, secretary to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Milan 6 February 1591.