Page - 710 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 13710 Finally he intended to include carefully drawn documentation of its ancient monuments and its principal modern buildings, ‘with well-measured plans and elevations and the measurements written in the appropriate places’, assur- ing the Duke that it was his intention ‘not to leave out anything that is remark- able in my fatherland<…>and particularly [its] buildings’.128 It is clear that Strada intended to drawn upon the documentation he had already collected to provide the bulk of the illustrations; but his new project now stimulated him to fill lacunae and to update his holdings. Nevertheless it is unlikely that Strada would have included Andreasi’s documentation of the Palazzo del Te and the Palazzo Ducale in its entirety in his illustrated edition of Alberti’s Descrittione. When he described the ex- traordinary sets of drawings of Raphael’s Loggia and Giulio’s Palazzo del Te in his Index sive catalogus it is clear that Strada esteemed these exceptional complexes so highly that he wished to publish them integrally in separate il- lustrated monographs or print-series. His 1575 edition of Serlio’s Settimo Libro gives a good impression of the level of precision and the graphic quality of the illustrations he envisaged. For the Descrittione, on the other hand, he would have contented himself with one or two general views of these monuments. With Andreasi’s drawings in Düsseldorf two drawings are preserved which seem more representative for the material Strada had collected documenting Italian architecture of his own time, and which are more plausible examples of the type of image Strada would have included in the Descrittione. They are a perspective view and an elevation of one of the facades of the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, built in 1560 for Cosimo I’s consort, Eleonora di Toledo, after designs by Bar- tolommeo Ammanati [Fig. 13.118–13.119]. These drawings appear very suitable for the illustrated topographical survey Strada had in mind: in his more ample description of the work in his Index sive catalogus he explains that a large part of the woodcut illustrations—all reduced to a uniform size and format similar to the illustrations in his 1575 edition of Caesar’s Commentaries—had already been executed, or at least drawn unto the woodblocks ready for the engraver. The importance Strada attached to the Descrittione is clear from the fact that among the many works in his publishing programme it was this that he de- scribed first and in greatest detail in his letter to Christoph Plantin, whom he hoped would consider printing it.129 128 Ibidem. 129 Doc. 1578-08-13, pp. 3–5. Plantin was interested, but was not sanguine as to its financial feasibility, and certainly was not ready to undertake the project on Strada’s conditions; see below, Ch. 14.8.