Page - 815 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

815Student of Antiquity V of Bavaria. This was done by Samuel Quiccheberg, who in his turn used his experience to develop his own treatise on the setting up and ordering of a uni- versal collection, the Inscriptiones vel tituli theatri amplissimi of 1565. Being so much at home in Fugger’s circle, Strada could fall back on such examples to develop some sort of ‘content-management’ system of his own to classify the vast quantity of documentary images he collected and exploited, in order quickly to find a particular text or image needed. A project such as the lost polyglot dictionary is inconceivable without some such filing system. To or- ganise the more than nine thousand drawings of coins included in Strada’s Magnum ac Novum Opus preserved in Gotha, he must have kept quite precise records, especially considering that he employed several draughtsmen in the manufacture of this and the various other numismatic manuscripts he offered to his patrons. The originals of the careful, rigorously uniform descriptions of obverse and reverse of each coin that his scribes copied into the versions of the A.A.A. Numismatωn Antiquorum Dιασκευη, the textual complement of the Magnum ac Novum Opus, must have been kept with the original drawings, or in a parallel, corresponding set of files or card index. The uniform formula Strada developed for these descriptions likewise prob- ably reflects methodical practice current in Fugger’s circle, in particular the uni- form entries on individual authors in Conrad Gesner’s Bibliotheca Universalis.25 Each entry gives a standardised methodical description first of the obverse, than of the reverse of the coin, always concluding with its inscription; the en- try always closes with a mention of the specimen on which the description is based, naming the metal, providing an indication of its size and sometimes its quality, and the collection in which Strada had seen it, for instance: ‘This most elegant and large coin was shown to us by Julius Romanus in Mantua’.26 The contents of these descriptions are as interesting for what they omit as for what they include. Strada must have been aware of the usage as currency of the coins he described, and he did at least distinguish the material of his exemplars. But he did not specify their exact size and weight; consequently the currency value of the coins are not noted. This suggests that his interest in them was primarily iconographical: his aim was to reproduce the images, to identify the portraits on the obverses and the objects on the reverses, and then to interpret their symbolism and to explain their historical significance. 25 On Fugger’s circle, see above, Chs. 3.1 and 3.2. Strada’s numismatic practice merits a more detailed investigation than is possible here; in addition the empirical, methodological aspects, it might be worthwhile to define the role played by the ekphrasis, the verbal description of a work of art (e.g. the shield of Achilles in the Iliad) that was an element in classical rhetoric, and of which Strada must have been very much aware. 26 A discussion of these descriptions and the drawings to which they relate in Jansen 1993(a), pp. 216–220; some examples are given in its annex 1 (pp. 227–230).