Page - 773 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

773Ambitions as a Publisher 14.7.5 Contemporary Art On his travels Strada had collected huge quantities of documentation, by direct purchase as well as by explicit commissions, both of antiquarian material— numismatics, inscriptions, sculptures, the remains of ancient mon- uments—and of contemporary achievements in the arts. Though the accent in his publishing programme is squarely on the antiquarian material, five items in the Index sive catalogus show that Strada did intend to publish some of the contemporary material as well. Two of these are collections of images of pal- aces and of monumental tombs respectively, found in Rome and in the princi- pal Italian cities (items 35 and 36). We do not know what they looked like, but their description suggests a high-class type of coffee-table book, which could serve both as a souvenir for travellers and as a source of inspiration for patrons and the artists they employed. Their type is similar to the print series pub- lished from the mid-sixteenth century onward by Roman and Venetian print- er’s firms, such as Antonio Lafréry and Hieronymus Cock, mostly documenting the antiquities of Rome. Strada knew these series very well and they may well have served as his example for these two items. His interest in documenting contemporary monuments nevertheless seems a little out of the ordinary. Two other items, however, are quite out of the ordinary: these are the com- plete reproduction of the entire decoration of Raphael’s Loggia in Vatican Pal- ace (item 42) and of the architecture and decoration of Giulio Romano’s Pala- zzo del Te and of the apartments he designed in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua (item 41). The lengthy descriptions in the Index indicate the value that Strada attached to these items, both of which were based on the reproduction draw- ings he had commissioned himself, and which have been discussed in greater Figures 14.40–14.42 Jan I Moretus, here by Rubens, actually wrote the answer by Christophe Plantin (here by Hendrick Goltzius) to the letter Strada had sent him through Rembertus Dodonaeus, here in the portrait included in the first edition of his Cruijdeboeck (1554).