Page - 810 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 15810 dispersed, floors in mosaic in black and white, various and spacious rooms, and in some spots deep basins full of water conducted by the Ap- pian aqueduct now mostly damaged or ruined.18 In view of Strada’s later involvement in festivals organised at the Imperial court, it is of some significance that he also paid detailed attention to public festivities in classical Rome. Thus for Vespasian [Fig. 15.9] he selected a reverse illustrating the Emperor’s triumph after having subdued the Jewish revolt, using an example close to a type actually struck under Titus, interpreting it as the triumphal curricle carrying the Emperor and his son Titus preceding a procession of the spoils of war [Figs. 15.10–15.11].19 Strada then added two and a half pages describing the triumph, a passage taken straight from Book vii of Flavius Josephus’ Judean War.20 Though he did not mention it, he may well have selected this event because it is so well documented in the beautiful reliefs of the Arch of Titus in the Forum Romanum. For Trajan [Fig. 15.12] he selected not one of the coins illustrating the famous Column, still standing in the centre of the remains of that Emperor’s forum, as might have been expected in view of his later interest in that monument, 18 Strada 1553(a), p. 105. 19 Here, as elsewhere in this chapter, I have presented coin images of which the visual quali- ties are such that they may have served as Strada’s sources; I have not attempted a defini- tive identifcation of the particular coin types Strada used. Such an identifcation has been undertaken by Volker Heenes, whose findings and critical analysis of Strada’s numismatic practice will become available with the results of our collective research project, Jacopo Strada‘s Magnum ac Novum Opus: A Sixteenth-Century Numismatic Corpus, which is fi- nanced by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and based at the Gotha Research Cen- tre of the University of Erfurt (fzg). Not wishing to anticipate his findings, I have not revised this section of my thesis, except as to find better exemplars of the coin-types I discuss. 20 Strada 1553(a), pp. 50–52; the text corresponds to Flavius Josephus’s Jewish War, Book viii, 116–155, cf. Josephus/ Thackeray 1961, pp. 538–551. Figures 15.12–15.14 The image of Trajan from Strada’s Epitome, and an exemplar of the coin type on which he based his description of a reverse.