Page - 646 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 13646 know that, though Ottavio’s drawings obviously were not autograph Raphael or Michelangelo, they were at least autograph Perino del Vaga.31 If this interpretation of the available data is correct, it is possible to con- clude that Jacopo Strada had kept Perino’s copies—or ‘Contrafactur’, accord- ing to Strada’s will—together as a separate entity until they were carried off by Ottavio, and he will have ordered the rest of his collection in similar coher- ent groups. The album of three hundred drawings which Ottavio offered to Prospero Visconti thus must have made part of the section of autograph figure drawings, while the architectural and ornamental designs constituted further sections, the latter including Giulio’s designs for goldsmith’s work and prob- ably also for costume, armour and ephemeral decoration for jousts, masques and other courtly festivities. The few identifiable remains from Jacopo Strada’s Musaeum that have remained intact consist of rather more heterogeneous ma- terial, and their contents suggest that relative quality also played some role in the ordering of the drawings.32 Unfortunately the data do not permit to decide whether those groups that Ottavio offered in bound albums—that is the prints, the Italian autograph drawings, and Giulio’s ‘invenzioni stravaganti’—represented selections made by himself, concerned to split up the material in easily negotiable items, or that they already had been put together in this form by his father. This lat- ter option is not improbable in view of the manner in which Giorgio Vasari had ordered one of the few contemporary collections of drawings of com- parable dimensions, his famous Libro de’ disegni. This Libro in fact consisted of several volumes, and the drawings contained in each of these had been mounted in splendidly decorated passe-partouts. It remains unclear whether these mounted sheets were actually fixed in the bindings, or could be shuffled around at will. That this second technique was not unusual is suggested by the wording of the descriptions of similar volumes of drawings in the inventory of a slightly later collection, that of the Emperor Rudolf ii, and of the presence in his Kunstkammer of ‘a big book [bound] in parchment [consisting] purely of blank paper of folio reale size, in which it is possible to keep all sorts of Disegni’.33 On the other hand the relics from Strada’s Musaeum show that at 31 On Niccolò Gaddi, see Arrighi 1998. 32 Vienna, önb-hs, Cod. Min. 21,3 includes, apart from copies from Strada’s workshop, some individual items; the codex preserved in the library of the Strahov Monastery in Prague, ms. dl iii 3, contains miscellaneous decorative designs and sketches mostly by and after Giulio Romano, and including some copies made in Strada’s workshop; cf. below, pp. Ch. 13.6. 33 Bauer/Haupt 1976, p. 139, nr 2799: ‘ein gross Buch in pergamen von lautter Ledigen regal- papir darein man allerhand Disegni legen kan’.