Page - 648 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 13648 2686. Another big book of folio reale size paper, bound in old, reused [‘verschriben’] parchment [i.e. the parchment used consisted of old let- ters or pages from an abandoned manuscript], in it mostly things and drawings in red and black chalk, after Michael Angelo Bonar: and other excellent men [‘valent homini’] 2694. A big and fat book bound in parchment in folio reale size, in it only hand drawings by the most important Italian masters.36 Item 2686 can with some confidence be identified with either the whole, or with a portion—in that case the larger sheets—of the consignment of drawings that Ottavio had sent to Florence in 1590, this both because of its contents— copies after Michelangelo and other masters, rather than drawings by their own hand—and because of the use of the term ‘valent homini’, echoing Ottavio’s description, in the German text of the inventory. Possibly this term was derived from a label or title page added when the material—which can perhaps be attributed to Perino del Vaga, as we have seen—was put together in a cheap binding of re-used vellum, either before or shortly after Ottavio ceded it to the Emperor. Item 2694, a large-size and bulky volume of drawings by important Italian artists, may well have been identical with the volume containing three hundred autograph drawings that Ottavio had offered to Prospero Visconti in November 1590. Finally it is rather probable that the ‘Inventioni stravaganti per fare una cre- denza di un gran Principe’ attributed to Giulio Romano, which Ottavio offered, but never actually sent to the Grand Duke, was identical with any one of the volumes containing drawings of ‘vasi in penna’ that are listed in the invento- ry.37 This may have been the codex that is still preserved intact in the library of the Strahov Monastery at Prague, as has been suggested by Beket Bukovin- ská, Eliška Fučíková and Lubomír Konečný in their integral publication of the album. The Strahov Codex contains a number of autograph designs for gold- smith work by Giulio and his school, but it also includes a number of copies of similar inventions executed in Strada’s own workshop, and a quantity of mis- cellaneous odds and ends: it constitutes an interesting and rare relic of Strada’s Musaeum, and will be discussed below. It is, however, more likely that Ottavio offered a more splendid volume to the Grand Duke, consisting exclusively of 36 Bauer/Haupt 1976, p. 134: ‘2686. Ein ander gross buch von regalbogen in schlecht ver- schriben pergamen copert gebunden, darin mehrerteils sachen und zaichnus mit rot und schwartzer kreiden, nach Michael Angelo Bonar: und anderer valent homini’ and p. 135: ‘2694. Ein gross dickh in pergamen gebunden buch in regalgröss, darin lautter von den fürnembsten italienischen maistern handriss’. 37 Bauer/Haupt 1976, p. 131, nrs 2582 and 2587.