Page - 845 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

845Agent of Change: Imperial Antiquary and Architect furnishing of their residences their gardens, and their funerary monuments. The Musaeum—especially the elegant room decorated with twelve Emperor’s heads in stucco over the windows—moreover provided a perfect setting for informal consultations among Strada’s various patrons or the officials repre- senting them, the scholars requested to contribute to the iconographical pro- gramme of festivities or ornamental schemes, and the artists involved in their execution. The decoration of the house, with the antiquities, art treasures and the library it contained, provided both a source of inspiration and concrete examples to imitate or emulate. Strada’s Musaeum also functioned as an office and workshop, in which he employed many assistants, to begin with the professional scribes who copied the text pages of the various manuscripts he had prepared. Then there were the young draughtsmen he had chartered in Rome to collaborate in the draw- ings for his Magnum ac Novum Opus, such as Giovanni Battista Armenini; a few engravers, such as Martino Rota, who worked for him in Vienna or elsewhere. His own son Ottavio likewise contributed to the libri di disegni, prepared exam- ples for the engraver, and, until his break-up with his father, helped organize and supervise the proceedings. Strada also employed one or two sculptors to restore the antiquities he had acquired for Duke Albrecht and for the Emperor, and perhaps for other projects. These latter tasks required a separate workshop on the ground floor, apparently situated in an annexe to his house. It is perfect- ly possible that some of the preparatory work for ephemeral decorations was also done here, under Strada’s own direct supervision: one could think of the pattern sheets for costumes, the three-dimensional scale models for triumphal arches, and the clay bozzetti for plaster figures. The terracotta sculptures used in the decoration of the Imperial Chamber in Bučovice give some impression what these latter may have looked like. 16.4.2 The Musaeum as an Economic Entity The stress Strada placed on his Musaeum makes clear that he considered it as an important element of his professional as well as his social identity, and that it was central to his efforts, or rather to his enterprise. That was not only because it was the place of manufacture of the libri di disegni, his best- documented source of income, but also because it provided the bases of much wider-ranging commercial operations. There are many indications that Strada operated within the field of international commerce: his international net- work of relations; the occasional glimpses we have of him providing financial or other economic information; his acting as a go-between in financial matters between the French ambassador and the Nieri, the bankers from Lucca resi- dent in Nuremberg who elsewhere turn out to be his own business partners;