Page - 664 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 13664 This was standard practice: a volume of similar goldsmith’s drawings Strada provided to the Kunstkammer of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria contains (copies of?) similar designs by or after a German artist, traditionally identified with Erasmus Hornick. On the basis of these a large group of drawings in various albums all over Europe and the United States have traditionally been attrib- uted to this master, an Antwerp goldsmith who had settled in Augsburg in 1555, moved to Nuremberg in 1559, then back to Augsburg in about 1566, and in 1582 ended up at the Imperial Court in Prague, where Rudolf ii appointed him ‘Kammergoldschmied’, a function he held only a few months before he died early in October 1583.59 This group of drawings has been studied exhaustively in an ample monograph by Silke Reiter, who concludes that in fact even a ten- tative attribution of most of the drawings to Hornick’s hand is warranted only in a few cases, whereas the close connection with material from the Strada workshop strongly suggests that in fact most of it was acquired at some time, or even commissioned by the Stradas—including those that can be attributed to Hornick himself. As Reiter suggests, it is perfectly possible that Strada, rec- ognizing Hornick’s talent and creativity, had commissioned him to supply him with such inventions, in order to include them in the libri di disegni he pro- vided his patrons.60 And he may have used them as models to show to patrons wishing to order sumptuous tableware—he may have acted as an ‘agent’ for Hornick, in a similar way as is documented earlier in his connection with Wen- zel Jamnitzer.61 The copies in such libri di disegni were commissioned and paid for by Strada. But he probably allowed the various draughtsmen he employed—for instance in his projects in Rome in the mid-1550s, such as Giovanni Battista Armenini— to copy his originals for their own use. In either case one may suppose that Strada owned either the original designs or at least careful copies of the origi- nal inventions. This holds also for the first twenty six sheets of Codex miniatus 21,3, which reproduce several figurative designs by Giulio Romano, chiefly for elements of the decoration of the Palazzo del Te. Many of these designs can be 59 The attribution to Hornick first advanced in Hawyard 1968; for Hornick’s biography. see in Reiter 2012, Ch. 3, pp. 31–60. 60 Reiter is doubtless right in doubting that a young but successful goldsmith and engraver as Hornick would just have gone to work in the ‘copy shop’ of the Strada’s to reproduce inventions of others (ibidem, p. 242). 61 In her paragraph, ‘Jacopo and Ottavio da Strada—die Agenten Erasmus Hornick’s?’ (ibi- dem, pp. 241–242), Reiter does not actually suggest this, but the hypothesis is warranted that the expertise Strada offered his patrons at court included mediation with his old and newer Nuremberg associates, in particular Jamnitzer, for whom he may have acted as a local agent. On Strada’s connection with Jamnitzer, cf. above, Ch. 2.5.