Page - 655 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

655Visual Documentation able to distinguish between them.46 Certainly the material it contained seems very close to the type of material we know Strada to have collected and to have used as raw material for his own projects. The original nucleus of the album consists of over 350 antique inscriptions, mostly Latin and some Greek, from Rome and other regions of Italy, from Nîmes, from Vienna and from Spain and Portugal, most of which were copied from other similar collections [Fig. 13.29 and 13.40, top], and of some 150 archi- tectural drawings. These drawings were copied for the greater part from models not antedating the end of the fifteenth century [Fig. 13.30], and they include some that can be linked to the circle of Giuliano da Sangallo [fols. 70v–71, Fig. 13.31: idealized views of the Pantheon and its interior; fol. 85, Fig. 13.32, top left: elevation and plan of the Basilica Aemilia]. The paper of this section of the al- bum suggests that its first owner came from Northern Italy, probably the Veneto. Only the later additions, which are either pasted unto or directly entered onto the pages that had remained unused, unequivocally link the album to Giulio Romano’s Mantuan circle. The following elements are of particular interest: Drawings: – A group of twelve plans of ten modern buildings [fols. 1–2, Figs. 13.33–13.34; fols. 5, 93, 9597, Z; two repeats]; most of these are identical to drawings in the so-called ‘Mantuan Sketchbook’ in Maarten van Heemskerck’s Berlin al- bums: these latter are regarded to have been copied from Giulio Romano’s projects by the so-called ‘Anonymous A’, a presumably Northern draughts- man who visited Mantua sometime between 1540–1550 and has been tenta- tively identified with the Dutch painter Hermannus Posthumus.47 46 The hand is late sixteenth century; it appears not to be Ottavio Strada’s, but might be Paolo’s. A provenance of the album and/or part of its contents from Serlio’s collection should not be totally excluded—Serlio seems to have known Giulio personally (cf. From- mel 2002, p. 66 and 80, notes 150–152) and he might have received it as gift from Giulio, or even from Federico Gonzaga himself; but this stretches the available evidence further than the assumption that Strada had acquired the album sometime in Mantua, and had later used its empty pages to archive other materials from his collection. The arguments against a provenance from Strada’s studio advanced in Juřen 1986 (pp. 118–119) are not very forceful: that it is not included in the Index sive catalogus is perfectly understandable, because that is not an inventory of Strada’s collection, but a list of manuscripts Strada considered ready for the press; and that the Spanish inscriptions included in it were not used as a source for those he added to his 1575 edition of Caesar’s Commentaries can be explained by the fact that he must have possessed many other syllogae of Spanish epi- graphic material, in part perhaps obtained though his connection with Antonio Agustín, which he may have considered more reliable. 47 The foliation of the codex are given as in Juřen 1986, whose attributions are generally fol- lowed; on the Anonymous A, cf. Hülsen/Egger 1900, ii, ff. 13, 13v, 29v, 58, 73v; Dacos 1989.