Page - 683 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

683Visual Documentation been prepared in a similar manner: as far as possible Strada would have re- duced the drawings to the same scale, and have recalculated the measure- ments annotated in his models to one common unit. This may well have been the same piede antico used in the Lille sketchbook, and taken over in Strada’s drawing: Strada’s pretension to archaeological erudition would have made him prefer the piede antico in any case, and he was most familiar with the ancient foot as used in Serlio’s circle, where it was divided into thirty-two once—as in the Lille drawing itself.90 Often Strada compared several drawings documenting the same monument in order to come up with as correct a version as was possible. At least that is what he implies in his preface to his edition of Serlio’s Settimo Libro, where he described the great quantity of architectural drawings he had been able to bring together: It is certainly true that I possess many doubles, and that gives me great satisfaction, being able to compare them with respect to their measure- ments—to such an extent that, for those things I will give you, there is no need to go and measure them again in Rome or elsewhere, because they will be excellent in every respect, and conforming exactly to the originals.91 The drawing in the Vatican codex probably made part of Strada’s own files, rather than of a finished manuscript intended for publication: while its verso shows the Amphitheatrum castrense, its recto gives—apart from the Arch of the Sergii—the elevation of the courtyard of the Palazzo Farnese. Yet it gives an impression of what such a manuscript might have looked like, and of the degree of precision that a printed version might have attained to. It may also be of some help in identifying other sheets from Strada’s studio. Had some of these volumes been preserved in their entirety in a public collection, their provenance, and hence their authorship, probably would have been known, so it must be assumed that they either were lost, like most of Giulio’s architectural drawings, or that they have been cut up and dispersed in later times.92 90 Günther 1988, pp. 225–231. 91 Serlio 1575, fol. A iiii-r.: ‘E ben vero che più d’una cosa doppia mi truovo, e questo mi è di una grandissima sodisfatione, per conferirle insieme per rispetto delle misure: A tale, che le cosa ch’io vi darò, non accadera ch’ le andiate à rimisurare à Roma, ò altrove: che saranno di tutto punto eccellenti, e giusto alle originali’. 92 Some of the originals—or volumes presenting copies taken from among these—may have been provided to Strada’s patrons. Thus the Ficklersche Inventar of the Munich Kun- stkammer mentions two books of drawings of ancient architecture which probably were acquired from Strada: nr. 105 (102): ‘Etliche stuck alt Römischer Gebew, thails in grundt