Page - 715 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

715Visual Documentation this quarter of a century the work had progressed no further than the letter B. The letter A consisted of sixteen volumes, in all covering 2500 ample double folii ‘written on both sides in very small letters’. These pages must have seemed black, impenetrable jungles, were it not for the thousands of images with which they were most literally illuminated. Again Strada first mentions his nu- mismatic images, including images taken from gems and intaglios, but then continues with inscriptions ‘and other figure of that sort, both painted panels and stones of precious marbles, and ancient tombs and monuments in which histories have been sculpted’. Apart from such by now traditional antiquarian material he moreover included designs [‘delineationes’] of many other things which he had found or seen (and copied), ‘of which an immense and infinite number is included in this dictionary’. Perhaps most important, he stresses twice that these images were inserted ‘in their convenient order and place’ or ‘in their proper places’: that is immediately adjacent to the subjects which they were intended to illustrate. A more immediate application of Quiccheberg’s and his own convictions cited above can hardly be imagined.142 Likewise the use of images as a source of information is evident in the case of the libri di disegni produced in Strada’s workshop, such as the Magnum ac novum opus, the voluminous numismatic compilation commissioned by Fug- ger and continued for Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria: this consisted of about ten thousand very detailed numismatic drawings and is singled out for particular praise by Quiccheberg.143 The style of the drawings included in these volumes bears this out: though carefully drawn, they can hardly qualify as works of art. They are standardized copies mostly after drawings or sketches Strada collect- ed on his travels, blown up to the ample size required for the volumes, and in many cases probably based on an intermediary ‘restored’ version in Strada’s own hand. This was certainly the case with the architectural reverses, which are careful reconstruction drawings of the monuments depicted, rather than faithful reproductions of the image as stamped on the coin: in this case the drawings pointedly serve as essays in antiquarian scholarship and in the ad- vancement of knowledge, rather than as reproductions of works of art. 142 The description of the Dictionary proper is immediately followed by the description of the index to the whole dictionary (Index sive catalogus, nr. 2), which by itself also took up sixteen volumes, covering 3506 folii: it explicitly referred not only to the finding ‘places’ of the texts, but also those of the various objects illustrated. Strada did not propose his dictionary itself to Plantin, but proposed this index as a work of reference to be printed in three columns, and compared it to the concordance of Plantin’s own famous polyglot Bible. 143 Cf. above, Ch. 3.3 and Figs. 3.23–3.34.