Page - 751 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

751Ambitions as a Publisher Whatever may have been the reason, it is clear that when Strada in August prepared to send Ottavio to Frankfurt, it was explicitly to occupy himself with the printing project.65 As we have seen, Ottavio’s report to his father of the end of the year bears this out: it gives a good impression of the many differ- ent negotiations the complexity of his father’s ambitions involved him in. The letter, which appears to reflect point by point his father’s lost letter, indicates that Ottavio was fully in his father’s confidence, had discussed the many as- pects of the various projects with him in detail, and had contributed his own ideas and opinions. It appears that, whereas his father supplied the intellectual concept and the idealistic drive for the project, Ottavio contributed a more level-headed, more business-like and realistic approach, and had an open eye for the potential market. Thus he was well aware of competing projects, advis- ing against reprinting the Epitome thesauri antiquitatum in a German edition because that had already been done by others, but also noting that the edition of Caesar’s Commentaries that Andrea Palladio was preparing posed no threat, because that would be of a different character than the edition planned by Strada, with different images, and he believed their own book would be more beautiful than Palladio’s and could be offered at a lower price.66 Apart from books soon to be published—Serlio’s Settimo Libro and the Caesar edition— and other works mentioned in the copyright privilege, another two projects are discussed, a book on the history of the Popes, which was to be illustrated by coats of arms and was probably intended as a pendant to the Lives of the Emperors mentioned in the copyright privilege. Strada had asked the help of Giovanni Battista Fonteo, an Italian humanist active at the Imperial court, to complete the histories and to obtain drawings of the coats of arms.67 Another interesting project mentioned is an illustrated Bible, the images for which were to be designed by one ‘Jan Baptista’, probably Strada’s Man- tuan associate Giovanni Battista Scultori, though Ottavio cautioned his father Gonzaga of Mantua to protect him from interference by the Holy Office. It is not clear whether this was actually given, and Strada appears in fact to have abandoned a planned trip to his hometown [Docs. 1568-01-29; 1568-01-30; and 1568-10-11]. Though Strada did re- quest a passport and Imperial letters of recommendation to Venice in 1574, it is not clear whether he actually travelled there. 65 Strada asked Maximilian for a passport for Ottavio for Frankfort, and that he was (nomi- nally?) appointed a servant of the Emperor; the passport was conceded, the appointment apparently not [Docs. 1574-08-00; 1574-08-09]. 66 Doc. 1574-12-05, transcribed in Appendix A. 67 Ibidem; Giovanni Battista Fonteo is chiefly known because he wrote the cartels for Impe- rial jousts designed by Arcimboldo and some texts explaining Arcimboldo’s composite portraits; but he also wrote a history of the Cesi family of Bologna; see Kaufmann 1978(a), p. 276.