Page - 673 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

673Visual Documentation 13.7 Strada’s Commissions of Visual Documentation: Antiquity 13.7.1 Acquisitions in Rome: Drawings of Coins and Sculpture Apart from the autograph drawings by celebrated Italian masters of his time and from their workshops which Strada had been able to acquire by favour of certain chance opportunities, the graphic section of Strada’s Musaeum also included series of drawings and illustrated manuscripts that he had commis- sioned himself. These drawings were not considered as works of art as such, but functioned to document both the principal monuments of Antiquity and the most outstanding achievements of the art of his own time. Such documen- tation was the fruit of a deliberate programme of acquisition, a programme which itself probably resulted from Strada’s conversations with his patron, Hans Jakob Fugger. Fugger had commissioned Strada to set up and organize a Corpus of drawings of ancient Roman coinage, a project which continued into the 1560s and resulted in literally thousands of numismatic drawings. During Strada’s travels to Lyon and Rome he remained constantly engaged in the per- fection of this Magnum ac novum opus, both providing drawings himself, and having them drawn under his own supervision by the various draughtsmen he employed to this end. As we have seen earlier, one of these draughtsmen was the young Giovan Battista Armenini. In his account of Strada’s purchase of Perino’s drawings, Armenini explains that he could study these at leisure, be- cause at the time he was living in Strada’s house, employed in drawing: …certain antique medals of bronze, and of gold, in watercolours, in the size of a palmo; which copies with their reverses, he then sent to the Fug- gers, wealthy merchants of Antwerp, a powerful city of Flanders, first hav- ing collected them into most beautiful books…72 Armenini was only one among many of the young artists that had flocked to Rome in those years who were employed by Strada in these labours, and the execution of the numismatic drawings was only one of the tasks he set them. Armenini relates how Strada had them produce a set of drawings documenting the decoration of the Vatican Loggia—to be discussed below—a set of which he himself took ‘to Spain to the great court of King Philip’, together with: …countless other drawings, which he bought everywhere or which he com- missioned us to draw for him: plans [probably both city maps and ground 72 Armenini 1587, pp. 64–65. Armenini’s testimony should be handled with some care: it was published and probably written thirty years after the fact, and his memory was not quite accurate: witness his locating the Fuggers in Antwerp instead of in Augsburg; and there is no other indication that Strada visited Spain after his stay in Rome in the mid-1550s.