Page - 841 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

841Agent of Change: Imperial Antiquary and Architect patron, the Emperor, to his officials, and to the artists employed, neither the extent nor the exact substance of this task is documented. Its extent should not be underestimated: there is sufficient reason to assume that it was more ample than the few documented instances would have us believe. As to their substance, the scope of Strada’s interventions, it is difficult to determine to what type of projects Strada was expected to contribute: did he have a finger in every pie, or was his advice only asked in connection with a limited, more or less clearly defined group of artistic endeavours? Though this question cannot be answered conclusively, it seems that his advice would have addressed either one or both of two principal aspects. The first aspect directly related to Strada’s antiquarian erudition, and involved providing iconographic information: examples are the tomb of Ferdinand i in Prague and the cos- tumes and decoration ‘all’antica’ for certain court-festivals. The second aspect involved giving more general artistic advice, for which Strada was qualified by his cosmopolitan cultural knowledge and his first-hand experience of the most advanced examples of the new style in Italy. In practice these two aspects often largely overlapped; it was Strada’s capacity to integrate these aspects that made him particularly attractive to his employers. Yet one should be equally wary of overestimating as of underestimating Strada’s tasks. There can be no doubt that Strada should not be considered as a minor court-official, earning his daily bread by his modest exertions for his Im- perial patron, under the day-to-day supervision of the department of one of the higher ranking courtiers, such as the Oberstkämmerer. He certainly was not the ‘Aufseher auf die Kunstkammer’ that Schlager held him to be, doubtless because of a misconception of Strada’s use of the term Antiquarius. If such had been the case, Strada would have been inscribed in the Hofstaat as a regular member of the Department of the Chamber, which was responsible for the maintenance of the movables in the Imperial residence. Instead, he was mentioned among a few ‘Diener von Haus aus’, implying that, even though he ranked with the other ‘gentiluomini’, a day-to-day attendance at court was not part of his duties. Moreover, Strada’s combined remuneration of three hundred Gulden annu- ally (which was almost always in arrears) bears no proportion to the expense and splendour of the house he built himself, at a cost he estimated at up to twelve thousand Gulden. An aristocratic residence built ex novo in the best part of town, it made him the neighbour of those scions of Austria’s feudal nobil- ity that filled the higher echelons of the Imperial court. We do not know what Strada, as eldest son, inherited from his father: the fact that he began building his house in Vienna almost immediately after Giovanni Rinaldo’s death, sug- gests that it may have been substantial. Part of his wealth may be explained by the generous patronage of Hans Jakob Fugger and the Duke of Bavaria—if he was paid the extraordinary sum of a ducat for each sheet of his Magnum ac