Page - 790 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

790 Chapter 14 Elector Christian i of Saxony with three albums containing drawings of busts of ‘the Roman and Greek (= Byzantine) Emperors up to Constantine xv, who lost Constantinople’.146 He claimed that he had taken them from his late fa- ther’s Kunstkammer in Vienna, and that they ‘were my father’s last work, that he has made with his own hand’, but since Ottavio at that time did not have access to his father’s cabinet, he must have brought these drawings in his pos- session much earlier; they are still preserved in the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden in the original red satin bindings.147 Also Paolo Strada disposed of some of the material he had inherited in a similar way, offering two volumes of his own continuation of the six books of numismatic drawings his father had earlier provided to Maximilian ii to the Imperial librarian Hugo Blotius in 1592, together with the large map of the 1529 Siege of Vienna by the Turks, item nr 8 in the Index sive catalogus. In 1594 he offered some architectural models and a list of books from his father’s library to Landgrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel.148 All this strongly suggests that Strada’s wish to have his books printed post- humously was tacitly or explicitly ignored by his heirs. For this one can hardly blame them, since Strada’s disposition cannot have been realistic and would have been impossible to carry out in any case. Certainly none of the books listed in the Index sive catalogus were printed in that form, and no other books were published indicating their provenance ‘ex Musaeo Jacobi de Stradae’. Nevertheless this does not mean that his material may not have found channels by which it still could be of use, and some of it may actually have been published in other books; since much of it was not actually composed by Strada himself, its provenance would not necessarily have been indicated. It would, for instance, not be surprising if some of Strada’s lexicographical mate- rials had ended up with the Hebraist Elias Hutter, who shared Strada’s linguis- tic interests, had visited him in Vienna and had recommended his labours to his own patron, Elector August of Saxony. Thus Hutter’s Dictionarium harmoni- cum biblicum, ebraeum, graecum, latinum, germanicum, printed in Nuremberg in 1598, may well owe something to Strada’s earlier labours [Fig. 14.43–14.44], as may Hutter’s scholarly polyglot Bible editions [Fig. 14.45]. In a similar manner it is unlikely that the woodblocks commissioned by Strada to illustrate his various books would never have been used for other prints. Thus some of the scenes in Sigmund Feyerabend’s many illustrated 146 HStAD 10024, Loc. 8543/1, fol. 159r; cf. Melzer 2010, p. 135; Jansen/Metze (forthcoming). 147 skd-kk, Ca 75–77. 148 Hugo Blotius to Wolfgang Rumpff, Vienna, 18 March 1592, önb-hs, Series Nova 363, ff. 159–160; Paolo Strada to Moritz Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, Vienna 23 December 1594, Marburg, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Bestand 4n, nr. 265.