Page - 712 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 13712 Armenini’s treatise. But Giulio himself had collected drawings and architec- tural designs on a much grander scale, in particular materials documenting the vestiges of classical art and architecture, which were particularly admired by Vasari.131 It was this example that stimulated Strada to collect material on a larger scale than was habitual for young artists and which, coupled to his own antiquarian interest, led him to include material that had no immediate artistic interest, but was a bearer of historical or philological information, such as inscriptions. 13.9.1 Fugger, Quiccheberg and the Kunstkammer Thanks to his subsequent contacts with Hans Jakob Fugger, who was more interested in scholarship and science than in exclusively artistic matters and who, in his huge library, attempted to build up a comprehensive survey of all available learning, Strada became aware of the value of the visual material as a source of knowledge, an alternative or complement to the available textual sources. In his turn Strada influenced Fugger’s interest in the careful graphic documentation of objects that were of historic, dynastic or artistic interest, as evinced in the Gehaim Eernbuch—the genealogy of his own family—and in the Ehrenspiegel des Hauses Österreichs—a history of Austria celebrating the Habsburg dynasty—which were both written under his supervision by the Augsburg ‘Stadtschreiber’ Clemens Jäger.132 A case can be made that the stress on visual documentation in Samuel Quiccheberg’s museological treatise, In- scriptionis vel tituli Theatri amplissimi of 1565, is the immediate consequence of Fugger and Strada’s fruitful exchange of ideas: the treatise was written more or less under Fugger’s supervision, and it refers repeatedly to Strada’s works, in particular his corpus of numismatic drawings commissioned by Fugger.133 Quiccheberg underlines the value of a well-ordered collection of images: With time assiduous patrons augment the quantity of albums and [loose] materials [in such a collection] to such an extent, that it becomes possible to master many disciplines solely from these images; for the 131 Vasari-Milanesi 1906, V, pp. 552–553. 132 Cf. above, Ch. 3.2. 133 Quiccheberg stresses Strada’s role in the genesis of this section of the Fuggers’ collections: ‘Raimundus [the Younger] vero cum eodem fratre [= Hans Jakob], antiquarum statuarum librorumque in quibus innumera numismata privatim depingitur, tanta volumina ad- hibito Iacob à Strada conquisivit, ut si asportandi sunt, eis aliquot clitellarii muli debeant onerari, cuius argumenti exemplaria solum in Caesareis museis apud Maximilianum im- peratorem conservantur augenturque’. (Quiccheberg/Roth 2000, p. 192); cf. above, Ch. 3.