Page - 850 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 16850 Similar groups can be found elsewhere in Europe: the French patrons of Sebastiano Serlio provide another example. The characteristics of such groups conform rather neatly with those of the group of ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopt- ers’ postulated in the paradigm of the diffusion of innovations, as formulated in Everett Rogers’ classic study first published in 1962.29 Based on extensive empirical research in widely diverging disciplines and in widely diverging cul- tural contexts, this paradigm provides a robust model for the transmission of new ideas, practices and technologies introduced into a social system. At least to some extent, this model can be—though rarely has been—applied to the diffusion of new intellectual and artistic phenomena in a given environment. It is worthwhile to apply some of its postulates and generalizations to Strada’s and his patrons’ roles in this process.30 16.5.2 The Antique as Innovation In order to use Roger’s paradigm to better understand Strada’s place in the dif- fusion of innovations in sixteenth-century culture, it is first necessary to define those particular innovations that Strada may have helped introduce or dis- seminate in Central Europe. For the purpose of my argument, I have defined a complex of four closely related developments: – the most important innovation is the interest in the material remains of Antiquity, and the use of the results of the study of these in contemporary art and architecture; – closely related to this is Strada’s espousal of the style of the Roman High Re- naissance in architecture and decoration, which itself is strongly influenced by this study of the antique example; – the stress on preparing, collecting and diffusing visual documentation on these subjects is perhaps the most original aspect of Strada’s career; – the development of institutional and systematic collecting in Germany, as pioneered by Hans Jakob Fugger and his circle, was brought into practice in the complex of collections realized in Munich, and was codified in Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones vel tituli Theatri. 29 Rogers 1962; I have used the fifth, extended edition of 2003, which includes an ample history of the research paradigm. I have treated the same theme, with a slight shift of emphasis, in Jansen 2015. 30 Rogers 2003 reviews thousands of studies in ‘the nine major diffusion research traditions’, a quantitative breakdown of which is given in table 2.1, pp. 44–45; history, the arts and culture in the narrower sense are conspicuously absent. An abstract of the following ar- gument was presented at the Colloquium Prag–Residenz des Habsburgers Ferdinand i, 1526–1564 (Prague, March 2015): Jansen 2015, pp. 205–207.