Page - 689 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

689Visual Documentation Venice. In the relevant entry in the Index sive catalogus Strada claims that the drawings and an accompanying description were his explicit commission: Also the famous column of the Emperor Theodosius of Constantinople which exists in Byzantium, which I also had drawn and described in Con- stantinople, at my expense, in a book of hundred folii; with all the figures and histories that are sculpted and engraved in it.104 At the time he doubtless had made a second copy of the set for himself which he could afterwards offer for publication to Christophe Plantin. It has been suggested that the set offered to Plantin was executed, or its production super- vised, by Strada’s elder son Paolo, who had been sent to Constantinople with an Imperial Embassy in 1569. It seems more likely that Strada had commis- sioned his own copy at the same time, from the same draughtsman, and after the same model as that destined for Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria. It can be as- sumed that Strada would have had contacts in Constantinople before sending his son there.105 Like those of Trajan’s column, the set of the Constantinople column was probably copied from an existing set, such as the one tradition- ally attributed to Battista Franco which is preserved in the Louvre as a rotulus mounted in a specially constructed table [Figs. 13.91–13.92]. That would not necessarily contradict Strada’s statement that he had commissioned his ver- sion in Constantinople.106 104 Index sive catalogus, Appendix D, nr. 40; and Doc. 1578-12-15. 105 Strada’s earlier contacts with Imperial diplomats in Constantinople included Vrančić, Rijm and Busbequius, from the latter of whom he obtained manuscript material, and can be assumed in the case of his neighbour in Vienna, Christoph von Teuffenbach (cf. above, Chapter 10.5). He sent his son Paolo to accompany Karel Rijm’s embassy with the explicit purpose to learn Turkish and Arabic, to acquire antiquities—particularly Greek manuscripts—and to collect documentation of the various monuments of that ancient capital. On Rijm, see Stichel 1990. Paolo Strada’s stay is documented in Strada’s letters, for instance to Duke Guglielmo of Mantua (Vienna, 5 November 1569, published in JdKS, xvi (1895), 2ter Teil, Reg. nr. 13998), and in requests to the Emperor on his son’s behalf (HH- StA, Staatenabteilung Türkei, i, 28, ff. 132r.–133v.) to which my attention was kindly drawn by Zweder von Martels. 106 A set of drawings could have remained in Constantinople. The set attributed to Battista Franco is in Paris, Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, Fonds des dessins et miniatures, inv. nr. 4951; cf. Müntz 1881; Becatti 1960, pp. 111–150; Lauder 2009, pp. 301–303. These drawings appear to have been mounted as a rotulus only in the seventeenth century; the present table probably dates from the eighteenth century. I am very grateful to Cathérine Goguel to have drawn my attention to these drawings, and to have arranged for me to see them and discuss them with me. Arnold Nesselrath and, following him, Goguel, have proposed an alternative attribution to Giulio Romano, in which case it is likely that Strada’s copies would have been based directly on Giulio’s model.