Page - 776 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 14776 works to suggest him to offer at least some of them to Plantin, and to be willing to recommend them to the printer, a good friend and of course the publisher of his own famed Cruijdeboeck, one of Plantin’s first, finest and most perennially popular editions. At the time Strada did not avail himself of this offer, but once Dodonaeus had returned to Antwerp in March 1578, and Strada’s other attempts to realize his ambitions had foundered, he wrote to Dodonaeus reminding him of his prom- ise, and included a list of the books he asked Dodonaeus to present to Plantin. This list is an item by item paraphrase in Italian of the Index sive catalogus, and thus provided Plantin at one go with the entire publishing programme Strada had in mind, in case anything in it might appeal to his correspondent.115 But Strada singled out one item in which he thought Plantin might be particularly interested, and with which he himself had been strenuously occupied over the last year. This was an expanded, illustrated Latin edition of Leandro Alberti’s Descrittione di tutta Italia, which had been first published in Italian in 1550, two years before its author’s death. Though as item nr 44 it comes relatively late in Strada’s Index sive catalogus, it was nevertheless a project with which he had been involved for many years, since a Latin edition of the book is already men- tioned in the copyright privilege Strada obtained from Charles v in 1556: that is ten years before the first Latin translation, by the humanist lawyer Wilhelm Kyriander, would actually be printed in Cologne.116 Strada appears to have continued collecting material to illustrate it ever since, but in 1577 he undertook a concerted effort to complete the appendi- ces he envisaged. He wrote to the Dukes of Mantua and Ferrara, sketching his plans for the new edition in rosy colours and telling them exactly what mate- rials he intended to add to the original version. For each region he intended to add a precise geographical map, as well as views of its principal cities and fortresses. For every city he also intended to add images of the principal monu- ments, ‘that is, both the ancient buildings, and the modern, with their plans and elevations well measured’; then the ancient inscriptions ‘drawn exactly as in they are in the marble, with the figures and ornaments that are found around them’. Moreover he wanted to add appendices with the names of the il- lustrious men of letters of each city and the works they had written; and finally 115 Doc. 1578-08-13. 116 On Leandro Alberti, cf. Redigonda 1960. The first edition of the Descrittione di tutta Italia was published in Bologna in 1550. The Latin translation, Descriptio totius Italiae, was first published in Cologne 1566, and immediately reprinted. It might be worthwhile to inves- tigate how much this translation, by the German scholar and lawyer Wilhelm Kyriander, may have or may not have owed to Strada’s initiative. Strada intended to use Kyriander’s translation in his own edition (cf. Doc 1584-12-05).