Page - 784 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 14784 possessions was frustrated by unwilling authorities in Vienna. He continued to try and find a purchaser for his collections. Thus early in 1581 he negotiated about the sale of a part of his library with Šebestián Freytag z Čepiroh, a former tutor of Rudolf ii. Since 1573 the learned Freytag was abbot of the Premonstra- tensian monastery of Louka (Klosterbruck) near Znojmo in Moravia, where he had instituted a college and established a printing press. He was eager to acquire the books of which Strada had sent him a survey, but it is not known whether they came to an agreement—if so, the abbey acquired only a part of Strada’s holdings, because his attempts to sell the remainder would continue almost until his death.128 But even if these efforts had concrete results—which we do not know— these were not sufficient to allow Strada to realize his dreams within his life- time. So he decided to provide for his project in his will or testament. The first version of this he made up in the spring of 1584 in Brno, where he had been carried after he had fallen seriously ill when employed at nearby Bučovice in Moravia by Jan Šembera Černohorsky z Boskovic.129 Since his property was mostly found in Vienna, he first tried to have the testament registered and guaranteed by the government of Lower Austria as well. In the end, however, he opted for a new version made up on the first of July of the same year: an imposing document held together by a splendid string of parti-coloured silk, and provided with the seals of Strada and the three witnesses.130 After the usual preliminaries Strada expressed the wish that, should he die in Vienna, he was to be buried in the Franciscan Church ‘ad Sanctam Crucem’, that is the Minoritenkirche, the church closest to his own house. Then he be- gan listing the legacies to his mistress, his servant, his young bastard daughter Sicilia and his two legitimate daughters and their children, none of whom got very much. His surviving daughter Lavina got only 100 Gulden, not only be- cause she had already been given her dowry, but also ‘because she never shows any loyalty or kindness to me’: which indicates that Ottavio was not the only 128 Docs. 1581-01-01 and 1581-02-03. It is not known whether a final agreement was reached. Perhaps the Strada volume in the Library of Premonstratensian monastery of Strahov in Prague arrived there from Louka (which was dissolved in the late eighteenth century). 129 Doc. 1584-04-30: ‘wie daß ich itzundt ettliche Monadte lang im Landt zu Mähren, bei dem Wolgebornen herren herren Hansem Schembre fon Tschernahor und Bosskowitz, auf Budtschovitz etc. meiner geschäfte halben gewesen, und nach dem [ingevoegd: ich] zu Budtschovitz mit krankheit uberfallen und beladen, habe ich mich von dan in die stadt Brijn führen lassen<…>’. 130 Doc. 1584-07-01, fully transcribed in Appendix B. The witnesses were Sebastian Hartman, Strada’s ‘Schwager’ (so either the husband of a sister of his wife or the husband of one of his own sisters); Adam Eberman, a civil servant, accountant at the Kammer (chamber of accounts) of Lower Austria, and Joseph Lamparter, owner of a ‘Hoftaverne’ in Vienna.