Page - 857 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

857Agent of Change: Imperial Antiquary and Architect Lazius, Sambucus and Clusius—fit neatly into this view, as does the appoint- ment, a little later, of the first Imperial Librarian, Hugo Blotius.39 This supports the contention that Strada likewise was deliberately em- ployed to introduce or at least to promote some of the desired innovations in antiquarian scholarship and the arts. Strada’s offer to move to Vienna with his family, his workshop and his collection, and his later investment in building a splendid mansion in an extremely advanced style to house these, must have been very welcome to his patrons. It created a minor but exquisite and ad- vanced centre of arts and scholarship, which contributed to the attraction and prestige of the Vienna court, at relatively little cost to the Emperor. In exchange for their facilitating Strada in setting up shop in Vienna, his august patrons probably implicitly expected him to open his Musaeum to, and share his exper- tise with their courtiers and with the artists, scholars, and other functionaries they employed. Thus Strada’s role was to diffuse the innovations he brought with him in their lands. The Emperor himself led the way in this by commis- sioning Strada to purvey suitable material for his collections and designs for some of his projects, and in using him as a consultant for other ventures. In this sense the Emperor can be considered the ‘agency of change’ that deliberately employed Strada to function as a ‘change agent’. 16.5.8 ‘Et io curioso di giovar al mondo’: Strada’s Promotion of Antiquity and Italian Art That a cultural policy, actively, consciously and conscientiously promoting the introduction and diffusion of new ideas and artistic forms in their dominions, was pursued by Ferdinand i and Maximilian ii, and that they employed Strada to that purpose, remains a hypothesis. Strada’s activities, however, do demon- strate abundantly that he himself did deliberately and expressly promote the study of Antiquity, the dissemination of knowledge both in text and image, the use of the formal language of the Italian High Renaissance—especially its Ro- man variant—in the arts and in the architecture of his adopted country, and finally the use of the image as a means of serving all of these ends. In part this promotion should be seen as the promotion any craftsman, artist, merchant or scholar would engage in to sell his wares or to obtain commissions or a job. But both the scope and the tone of Strada’s efforts transcend such elementary 39 The iconography of Maximilian’s famous silver gilt fountain, whose significance must have been closely directed by himself, centres on both the monarch’s rights and his duties towards his people (cf. above, Ch. 2.5.4). Blotius’ unsuccessful attempt to turn Maximil- ian’s court library into a truly Imperial library, i.e. a sort of central library for the Holy Roman Empire, reflects a similar consciousness of its public function and utility; cf. Brummel 1972, pp. 6–80; Siegert 2004.