Page - 762 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 14762 Gonzaga palace of San Sebastiano at Mantua (item 17).93 It is equally odd in a case such as the Koran written in golden script and splendidly illuminated that had reputedly belonged to Mustafa, Suleiman the Magnificent’s eldest son who was strangled as a result of his stepmother Roxelana’s palace intrigue (item 26). Such splendid objects may well have been included mostly because of Strada’s pride in having obtained them, and perhaps partly in the hope that one of his patrons would make a substantial offer for one of them. Yet in view of the high quality he envisaged for some of the other items he certainly did intend to have printed, it cannot be excluded that even for Prince Mustafa’s Koran he had some sort of luxury printed reproduction in mind, something akin to a modern facsimile edition: after all he knew ‘of no book that for elegance can be compared with this, such is its beauty and excellence, so that it equals pre- cious stones’. Moreover almost all the other items included in the list were intended to be printed, as is clear from their descriptions, which give information on their contents, but sometimes also on their status of completion, and in how far the illustrations had already been finished and engraved. This latter fact is of im- portance, because the common characteristic of almost all of the items includ- ed in the Index is that Strada intended to illustrate them profusely. In many cases the images were in fact the raison d’être of the work, as is the case for the various ‘tabulae’ listed in the Index. Doubtless these were intended to be printed on separate sheets which the buyer could at will have bound in a book, have pasted together on a linen support, as was the custom for geographical maps (a good solution for the bird’s eye’s views of Rome and Cairo and for the view of the Castrametatio of Suleiman the Magnificent at his siege of Vienna (items 11, 12 and 8), or formed into a rotulus: a good solution for sets of images of the Columns of Trajan, Marcus Aurelius and Theodosius, the frieze of the Camera degli Stucchi in the Palazzo del Te (items 37, 40, 41 and 42), and the various images documenting how the Sultan, his suite and his army set out for his campaigns (items 10 and 11). 93 It has been suggested above (Ch. 2.3) that Strada may have known Hermannus Posthumus and perhaps Maarten van Heemskerck in Rome in the 1530s; Posthumus afterwards came to Mantua, and later worked in Landshut, an itinerary close to that of Strada himself. Manuscript material from Strada’s collection to some extent relates to the Heemskerck and Posthumus material (the Berlin sketchbooks). Posthumus’ well-known painting Tempus edax rerum now in the Liechtenstein collection provides some inkling of what Strada’s commission may have looked like. On the Cairo painting, see Brown 1984; Bourne 2001, p. 108. Strada may have been inspired by the earlier huge woodcut image of Cairo engraved by Giovan Domenico Zorzi and published with an accompanying description by Matteo Pagano in Venice in 1549, the whole edited with a full-size facsimile reproduc- tion in Warner 2006.