Page - 802 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 15802 expectation warranted by the second clause of Stephanus’ lemma.6 In the first half of the sixteenth century the term ‘antiquarius’ began to be used more often specifically for those who investigated, collected, documented and often published the material relics of the past, be it that of Ancient Rome or of their own local earlier civilization: ruins, tombstones, excavated sculptures, inscrip- tions, coins, gems, seals, as well as charters, diploma’s and other archival docu- ments. Like Leland and Strada, other students of the past, for instance Andrea Fulvio and Bernardo Gamuccio, expressly presented themselves as ‘Antiquari- us’ on the title-pages of their books. Eric Cochrane’s chapter ‘Antiquities’ gives a succinct survey of the many Italians of various background and education who exerted themselves in this field: lawyers, physicians, philologists, histo- rians as well as architects and painters, such as Pirro Ligorio. Like most other disciplines of the period, such antiquaries based their studies always on the available classical sources: their interest in the material remains of Antiquity was partly based on their wish, as humanists, better to understand these writ- ten sources, whereas on the other hand these allowed the understanding or at least the interpretation of the material remains.7 It is unclear whether self-styled antiquaries such as Leland and Fulvio con- sidered the study of antiquities as (a part of) their ‘profession’, but if they opted to identify themselves as such that seems not unlikely. If this was the case, they provide an earlier parallel to Strada, who did explicitly consider himself to exercise a ‘profession’ indicated by the term ‘antiquarius’.8 On the title page of Strada’s earliest printed book, the Epitome thesauri antiquitatum of 1553, its provenance ‘Ex Musaeo Iacobi de Strada Mantuani Antiquarij’ is proudly indi- cated.9 When Strada was first employed by Ferdinand I in 1558, he was appoint- ed as a ‘Baumeister’, that is as an architect, and the second office he obtained after Maximilian ii’s accession is indicated in very general terms as ‘Ein Diener von Haus aus’. Yet already in his own letter to the young King Maximilian of 6 Though Leland styled himself an antiquary in a pamphlet offered to Henry viii, there is no evidence that this title was attached to his function at court, cf. Momigliano 1950, pp. 313–314. 7 This point is made in Ingo Herklotz, ‘Arnaldo Momigliano’s “Ancient History and the Anti- quarian”: A Critical Review’, in Miller 2007, pp. 127–153, in particular Section iii: ‘Literary and Non-Literary Sources’(pp. 136–141). 8 One might ask what Strada can have meant with he term ‘profession’, which itself has a range of connotations—from simple ‘livelihood’ or ‘means of subsistence’, via ‘schooled craft or art’ and ‘vocation’, to the explicit public presentation or ‘profession’ of a given science and/or conviction. All these connotations existed in the sixteenth century, and Strada’s use of the term reflects at least some of them. Since he does not specify these, I have not attempted a further interpretation. 9 But Strada does not use the term on the earlier title pages of his albums of numismatic draw- ings in Gotha (1550, for Hans Jakob Fugger) and Paris (1554).