Page - 808 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 15808 This suggests that Strada saw his ‘medaglioni’ primarily as illustrations of an- cient history as known from literary sources. Though he probably grasped the significance of the more adventurous investigations of contemporaries such as Pirro Ligorio, which he probably knew about, and Guillaume du Choul, with whom he was intimate and whose research he supported, he hardly used the material he had collected to draw new conclusions on specific aspects of clas- sical civilization himself. The only exceptions to this were the fields of architecture, warfare and public festivities. Strada’s interest in the military strategy and the engineering feats of the Romans is evident in the surveys he collected or commissioned of the friezes of the Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius in Rome and that of Arcadius in Constantinople, of Serlio’s illustrations of Polybius, and of the reconstructions of Caesar’s battles he published in his 1575 edition of the Series è tanto coppiosa quanto imaginar si possa; et sempre ò pigliato medaglioni, li più belli e li più rari, et quelli che portano la historia con essi, che io habbia fra di essa.’ Figures 15.5–15.7 Pages from Strada’s Epitome thesauri antiquitatum, Lyon 1553: image of a coin of the Triumvirs and the description of its reverse (p. 11), and descriptions of the Mausoleum of Hadrian (p. 72) and the Baths of Caracalla (p.  105). Figure 15.8 The Baths of Caracalla in their present state of ruined grandeur.