Page - 731 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

731Ambitions as a Publisher partly thanks to the large quantity of woodcut illustrations, attributed to Bernard Salomon, that Strada had commissioned for it. It filled a niche in the demand for easily digestible information about the history of Imperial Rome, and about its coins: because of their relative accessibility, their (often) relatively low cost, and their small bulk, these had become the most widely coveted collector’s items both among scholars and aristocratic and bourgeois amateurs.24 24 The Epitome thesauri antiquitatum is one of the earliest of a host of similar illustrated nu- mismatic treatises published in the mid-sixteenth century: cf. Cartier 1937, pp. 357–359; Rave 1959; Jansen 1991, pp. 59 and 66; Haskell 1993, ‘The Early Numismatists’, pp. 11–25; Figures 14.10–14.11 Copies after Jacopo Strada, images of Isaac I Komnenus and Constantine X Doukas in Diethelm Keller, Kunstliche und aigendtliche Bildtnussen der rhomischen Keyseren, ihrer Weybern und Kindern, Zürich 1558, which is a reworking of Strada’s 1553 Epitome thesauri antiquitatum, for which new woodcuts were made, copied from Strada’s illustrations.