Page - 675 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

675Visual Documentation Though some of the classical sculptures preserved in the Vatican, in the collections of the local patricians and the prelates resident at the Papal court probably were recorded on the spot, in many cases even such items were repro- duced from extant earlier drawings (of which a great many were circulating), and occasionally even from prints. This is evident from Strada’s Vienna al- bum Antiquarum statuarum (= Codex miniatus 21,2, already described above). As its title implies, it documents antique full-length statues. It is composed of some hundred and seventy rather uninspired copies, executed in Strada’s own workshop, after examples from the files of images Strada had acquired and commissioned during his stay in Rome, and gives some impression of the quantity and the character of the material he had brought together [above, Figs. 13.43–13.46]. Many of these copies were derived from graphic prototypes which were copied also in the albums of other antiquaries and artists, and of- ten finally found their way into print.77 Drawings directly sketched after the object itself were presumably only commissioned when no acceptable design of a given object was readily available.78 Two rather more elegant sheets pre- served in the miscellaneous selection of relics from Strada’s Musaeum, also in Vienna, show a few male statues in their unrestored state: these likewise were the results—or were based on the results—of Strada’s acquisition campaign of 1554–55.79 [Fig. 13.72–13.73] The same album also includes a series of pages of precise drawings of an- tique portrait busts [Figs. 12.5, 12.16–12.17 and 13.74–13.77]. Like most—though not all—of the items included in the Antiquarum statuarum, these busts are all shown in a restored state.80 This implies that they represent a subsequent stage of reception of the antique originals: applying both antiquarian and ar- tistic criteria, Strada provided a reconstruction of the original which made it both more readable and—doubtless of great importance—suitable as a model or example for its reproduction and subsequent use in contemporary deco- rative schemes. Examples are his own house and the studioli of Hans Fugger and Jan Šembera Černohorský z Boskovic discussed and illustrated in Chapter 12.4.2 [Figs. 12.14–12.15]. These drawings provided part of the raw material used for the production of the two sets of drawings of Roman portrait busts from Strada’s workshop that have recently been identified in the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden. One  of these, K.-K. Ca 74, is a single volume containing hundred and ninety drawings 77 önb-hs, Cod. min. 21,2; cf. above, Ch. 13.6.3. 78 Thus the drawings of the statues Strada supplied to the Munich Antiquarium (above, Ch. 12.2.2, Figs. 12.01–12.04) presumably were based on sketches Strada himself had made on the spot. 79 önb, Cod. min. 21,3, fols. 55–56. 80 önb, Cod. min. 21,3, fols. 61–70.