Page - 728 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 14728 over the years, visiting or corresponding with business relations, patrons and potential collaborators.21 For many of these activities Ottavio needed ready money to pay his vari- ous contributors, and his letter includes much information about his expenses and a repeated request to send further funds as soon as possible: ‘Try hard, father, to send me as much money as you can, for when I can do little here, my staying is not worth the expense’.22 Ottavio was sufficiently in his father’s confidence to counsel him about the feasibility of various projects, and to be entrusted with these negotiations and with large amounts of money. Never- theless Jacopo followed Ottavio’s activities quite closely and critically: thus he appears to have objected to his departure from Frankfurt to Nuremberg, which Ottavio justified by an outbreak of the plague. Referring to testimony of his father’s business associate Paolino Nieri, Paolo stressed that it claimed over two hundred victims a week, and that Feyerabend himself had decided to flee to Nuremberg in Ottavio’s company. Yet Ottavio’s letter, business-like but at the same time chatty and intimate, as yet gives no inkling of the clamorous breach in the relations between father and son which took place a few years later, which led to Strada largely disinheriting his once favourite son, citing no less than sixteen alleged ‘crimes’. At least some of these related to a less than hon- est stewardship in the printing business, an allegation to which I will return later in this chapter. 14.4 The Publishing Project: Strada Ambitions as a Publisher 14.4.1 The Epitome Thesauri Antiquitatum Ottavio’s letter is a fascinating introduction to Strada’s ambitions as a pub- lisher. These were probably at least in part the result of his intimacy with the great book-lover and collector Hans Jakob Fugger and the many scholars in his 21 Ottavio mentions contacts with Paolino and Francesco Nieri or Neri, merchants from Luc- ca, his father’s business partners, and with the Werdeman, bankers in Nuremberg; Mino Celsi and Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, marquis of Oria, the two famous evangelical exiles from Italy who were involved in establishing the texts of the Serlio volumes; and the humanist Giovanni Battista Fonteo, employed to provide texts for another project; he promises to visit Vilém z Rožmberk in his father’s name. The level of Ottavio’s contacts at the Imperial court are indicated by his request that his father greet ‘Messer Martin’, doubtless Strada’s old acquaintance, Maximilian’s chamberlain Martín de Guzmán, and Alfonso ii del Carretto, marquis of Finale, at the time at court to plead the restitution of his territories. 22 doc 1574-12-05: ‘Circate, Signor Padre, di mandarmi più denari che potiate<…>, perchè facendo poco qui non merita la spesa’.