Page - 692 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 13692 include views of three sides of the Column of Arcadius in its entirety, is simi- lar in elegance and precision to those Strada commissioned at Mantua from Ippolito Andreasi. The only anomaly is that the draughtsman of the Freshfield album was aware of the true identity of the column of Arcadius, whereas Stra- da himself apparently was not.108 Strada’s particular interest in the ‘colonna coclida istoriata’ is quite evident: a type of monument which combined architecture with figurative sculpture providing a lot of factual archaeological information and an imperial iconog- raphy was bound to appeal to an Imperial Antiquary who was also a practising architect. He shared this interest with many of his contemporaries, to begin with his master Giulio Romano, who had not only repeatedly used individual figures and scenes from the frieze of Trajan’s column as sources of inspiration, but had actually emulated it in the splendid stucco double frieze, representing the battle-order of Julius Caesar, of the Camera degli Stucchi of the Palazzo del Te.109 That Strada included Giulio’s drawings of this frieze among the antiquar- ian material he intended to publish—and on an equal footing with Giulio’s antique examples—testifies both to his admiration for Giulio’s archaeological erudition and his conviction of the utility of the information such material could provide. Several of the original designs from Giulio’s studio are now in the Louvre; the complete set of copies preserved in the Albertina may well be the set Strada prepared or commissioned for the engraver on the basis of the original drawings in his possession.110 13.8 Strada’s Commissions of Visual Documentation: Contemporary Architecture and Decoration 13.8.1 Rome Armenini’s description of Strada’s activities in Rome appear to stress his in- terest in classical Antiquity, but in fact he says that Strada acquired material documenting ‘cose assai antiche, che si sono ritrovate per quella Città in di- versi tempi, che però erano delle più notabili, et più perfette dell’altre’, that is: ‘quite ancient things found in that City dating from various periods, especially those that were more noteworthy and more perfect than others’. The plans of Florence and Pisa Cathedrals in the Strahov Codex witness that these could 108 But it is also possible that Strada consciously preferred to indicate Arcadius’ column with the name under which it was perhaps more generally known. 109 Agosti/Farinella 1984, pp. 415–416; on the Camera degli Stucchi, see Verheyen 1977, pp. 123–127; Konrad Oberhuber, ‘L’appartamento dei Giganti e l’ala meridionale’, in Giulio Ro- mano 1989, pp. 364–374. 110 Index sive catalogus, Appendix D, nr. 14; discussed above, Ch. 13.6.3.