Page - 743 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

743Ambitions as a Publisher Strada’s work in other ways. When Strada requested the Emperor sometime in 1571 to instruct the ambassador in Constantinople to have a bundle of his texts translated into Turkish, Arabic and Persian, he was confident that this would be granted.48 In a similar way Strada may have sent around the texts of his en- tries to various scholars contracted to provide correct translations. 14.5.3 Caesar’s Complete Works, Annotated and Illustrated It may be assumed that Strada occasionally or regularly employed scholars and artists in a similar way for his many other projects, for instance in trans- lating Leandro Alberti’s Description of Italy into Latin and in providing the supplements he planned to add to it. As we shall see below, the number and the character of the encyclopaedic compilations which Strada had available for publication by the mid-1570s indicate that work on these had steadily continued during the 1560s. The first concrete piece of evidence of these is a copyright privilege from the French King Charles ix, which was granted to Strada on Christmas Day of 1572. This apparently extended to a list of sever- al planned publications, but it is known only through the text as included in Strada’s 1575 edition of Caesar’s Commentaries, and therefore only gives title and description of that one book.49 From this document it appears that the work as planned differed from the one eventually printed [Fig. 14.21–14.27]. In the first place, Strada intended the book to be bilingual, presenting the complete Latin text next to an Ital- ian translation: the exact reverse of what he planned for Serlio’s Settimo Li- bro, where Serlio’s Italian was complemented by a Latin translation. That he thus wished to cover a European, rather than a local market is evidence for 48 Doc. 1571-00-00. 49 Caesar 1575: ‘Iaques de Strada Mantuan, antiquaire de l’Empereur nostre tres cher et tres amé beaupere et cousin, nous a fait entendrè qu’il desireroit volontiers faire mettre en lumiere les livres contenus en une feuille de papier à nous praesentee, et attachee sous le contreseel de nostre chancellerie. Desquels le premier est, un livre en langue italienne, ensemble avec la version Latine, intitulé en Italien, C. Iulij Caesaris rerum gestarum Com- mentarij xiv. Nempe: C. Iul. Ces. De Bello Gallico, Comm. vii. A. Hirtij. De eodem, Liber I.C. Iul. Caes. De Bello Civili Pompeiano, Comm. iii. A. Hirtij De Bello Alexandrino, Liber I. De Bello Africano, Liber I. De Bello Hispanico, Liber I. Omnia collatis antiquis manu- scriptis exemplaribus, quae passim in Italia, Gallia, et Germania invenir potuimus, doctè, accuratè, et emendatè restituta. Eutropij Epitome Belli Gallici, ex Suetonij Tranquilli monumentis, quae desiderantur. Cum doctiss. Annotationibus Henrici Glareani, Fulvij Ursini Romani, Francisci Hotomani, I.C. Aldi Manutij, P.F. <…>Donné à Paris le xxv. iour de Decembre, l’an de grace 1572 et en notre regne le xiii’. A cursory investigation of the relevant indices of the Archives Nationales in Paris suggests that both Strada’s request and the original of the privilege were probably destroyed. I am grateful to Odile Bordaz to have guided me in this quick search.