Page - 750 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 14750 for Duke Albrecht about the Vendramin and Mocenigo collections that were on the market. But since at the beginning of this same letter Strada told Fugger that he had decided to try and sell both his house and his studio, with every- thing in it, this seems unlikely.61 It is much more probable that Ottavio was sent to Venice to start negotiations with the Venetian printers and to commis- sion illustrations for the several planned books from some of the famous Vene- tian woodcutters and engravers. There seems little doubt that Strada originally planned to have his books printed in Venice, for shortly after having obtained the copyright privilege he not only requested and obtained a further, general privilege for all the books and images he had collected and wished to publish in future, but also asked for permission to travel to Venice ‘in order to have his books printed’, as well as a passport and letters of recommendation to the Doge and the Signoria.62 Strada opted for Venice probably both because of the stature of Venetian humanist printing and the quality of its engravers, but his wish to print some of his books in Italian must have been an additional motif. Ottavio’s troubles in Frankfurt with the text editing and proofreading of Ser- lio’s Settimo Libro show that printing serious works in Italian was not as yet common in Germany, and far from simple: It is quite something that in Germany, where there are no Italians, some- one is printing Italian [books]; if Wechel had not accepted to print, you wouldn’t have found any opportunity here, and certainly would have wasted your time in wanting to print Italian in Germany, where there is no one [to assist in that]: you would not believe how few learned men there are in Frankfurt.63 So there must have been serious reasons for Strada to abandon his project to print his books in Venice and to choose Frankfurt instead: perhaps German printers were cheaper, or perhaps he thought he would have less competi- tion for his type of books in Germany; certainly the Frankfurt book fair must have provided a strong attraction. The suddenness of his decision in favour of Frankfurt, however, suggests that it may have had to do with a failure to ob- tain a safe-conduct from the Signoria that would protect him against the Papal Inquisition.64 61 Doc. 1574-02-01. 62 Doc. 1574-00-00. 63 Doc. 1574-12-05 (transcribed in Appendix A). 64 When Strada returned to Venice in 1568, after his precipitate flight from the Papal Inquisi- tion in Mantua the summer before, he took great trouble to obtain an Imperial safe-con- duct, and through Maximilian’s intervention, a similar guarantee from Duke Guglielmo