Page - 734 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 14734 Panvinio, a prodigiously learned young Dominican working in the orbit of Car- dinal Farnese and a good friend and protégé of Antonio Agustín. Doubtless it was through Agustín that Panvinio and Strada met; in any case he was involved in drawing up the contract which gave Strada the right to publish Panvinio’s efforts.27 Since the copyright privilege indicates Panvinio’s Fasti as ‘Tomus Primus’, Strada appears to have conceived it as a companion volume of his own numis- matic compendium of the Roman Empire, which follows it in the copyright privilege and is indicated as Tomus Secundus. This was a ‘universal description’ of all the coins issued by the Roman Emperors and their successors from Julius Caesar up to the ruling Emperor, Charles v.28 It is in fact the numismatic cor- pus announced in the preface to the Epitome thesauri antiquitatum, which, as its title indicates, is a resumé of this more ambitious work. It was based on the collections of sketches, casts, descriptions of Roman coins Strada had brought together: the same material on which he drew for the Magnum ac novum opus, the corpus of numismatic drawings commissioned by Hans Jakob Fugger, and the accompanying volumes of detailed descriptions of obverses and reverses of each individual coin-type.29 In the following years it would grow in am- bition and size, but it would never be printed, though it doubtless provided the basis for Ottavio Strada’s De vitis imperatorum et caesarum Romanorum, posthumously published in three volumes in Frankfurt in 1615–1618 [below, Figs. 14.47–14.48].30 That Strada conceived Panvinio’s Fasti et triumphi and his own numismatic corpus as complementary volumes is not illogical: the huge epigraphic state calendar, listing all the magistrates of the Roman Republic and the Empire, and the coins issued by the Emperors, together provide the principal authentic, contemporary sources on the chronology and the political history of the Roman Empire. The ecclesiastical history of the Empire was to be served by the publica- tion of another work that Strada had obtained from Onofrio Panvinio, a ‘brief description’ of the Popes from St Peter up to the ruling pontiff, Paul iv Ca- rafa, giving a summary survey of the election, the principal acts and death of each Pope, and a list of the cardinals they created. It is a work of reference 27 Doc. 1557-11-27; cf. above, chs. 3.6.2 and 4.2. 28 Doc 1556-01-08: ‘Universalis descriptio numismatum omnium imperatorum ex aere, ar- gento et auro a Julio Caesare usque ad Carolum Quintum imperatorem augustum, que quidem hodie in Italia, Gallia, Germania variisque hinc inde locis inveniri potuerunt, Ja- cobo de Strada, Mantuano antiquario, aucthore, tomus secundus’. 29 Described above, Ch. 3.3. 30 Cf. below, Ch. 14.5.4.