Page - 826 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 15826 his colleagues and other interested individuals. Strada’s eagerness to divulge and exploit the knowledge he had obtained and the materials he had brought together can be linked to the emphasis on practical use postulated in Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones vel tituli theatri amplissimi, the first treatise on the constitution of an ideal scientific collection or museum. Both reflect the ideas current in Hans Jakob Fugger’s circle, to which Strada and Quiccheberg be- longed. Both were influenced by the Bibliotheca Universalis, the first compre- hensive general bibliography first published between 1545 and 1549 by Fugger’s close associate Conrad Gesner. Through his close connections with the book trade Strada probably was also aware of similar enterprises elsewhere, such as Theodor Zwinger’s Theatrum humanae vitae, even before it was first printed in 1565. He must certainly have been influenced by it after publication, even if only negatively, deciding that his own Dictionarium xi linguarum should be ordered alphabetically, instead of systematically. But Strada’s ambition owed as much to Italian as to German example. The emphasis on the use of classical sources in Strada’s dictionary project corre- sponds with contemporary humanist preoccupations; in particular it reflects ideas current in the learned circles around the Papal Curia in Rome, with which Fugger himself was in close contact. An emphasis on the material re- mains—as most reliable sources for ancient history—and therefore on anti- quarian examination and documentation of inscriptions, coins, objects and figurative works of art was a component of such studies at least since Raphael’s appointment, in 1515, as supervisor of all archaeological finds in Rome. Already in his teens in Mantua, Strada had been initiated in these ideas by Raphael’s favourite pupil, Giulio Romano, and he had obtained ample first-hand experi- ence in the field during his prolonged sojourns in Rome in the 1530s and the mid 1550s. The idea to codify the results of such studies in an alphabetically ordered and illustrated dictionary or encyclopaedia was initiated in this Ro- man circle, and various relics of these efforts are preserved, for instance in the work of Strada’s colleague, the architect and antiquary Pirro Ligorio.33 But Strada’s ambition to extend such a work beyond Antiquity and the classical languages appears to have been his own idea. In part it was a logical conse- quence of his close connection with Fugger, whose interests included the later history of the Holy Roman Empire as well as practical contemporary politics, and in part of Strada’s permanence at the multilingual Vienna court, where both ideological and practical reasons created a demand for it. Strada’s wish to reach an audience beyond that of the professional intellectuals thus was the consequence of the demand of his patrons, as much as of his own didactic ambitions. 33 Cf. above, Ch. 3.7.1.