Page - 864 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 16864 at first sight Strada appears to fit the prototype of the polyhistor, the prover- bial universal ‘Renaissance Man’. Certainly he displayed the wide interests, the erudition and the cosmopolitan outlook that were the consequence of his con- siderable intellectual and artistic gifts, his courtly education in Mantua under the aegis of the Gonzaga dukes and Giulio Romano, and the opportunity he had to travel widely even in his youth. His project for a polyglot encyclopaedia of unprecedented size likewise presupposes a universal interest in all sciences. Yet the survey I have given shows that—however wide his interests may have been—he specialized primarily in the history and the material remains of the classical past, and in the visual arts and the architecture of his own day. In fact many important disciplines, such as theology, law, medicine, most of the natural sciences, and music are conspicuously absent in his professional activi- ties, though they were probably amply represented in his library. And even his polyglot dictionary, based as it appears to have been on the written sources from Antiquity, probably would have resulted in a fictive reconstruction of the erudition of the Ancients, rather than a codification of contemporary science. Strada’s merits as a scholarly antiquary are modest: as one of the earliest au- thors of a more or less systematically ordered, illustrated numismatic treatise, he has a small but not unimportant place in the history of classical scholar- ship. But the greater part of the results of his numismatic research remained in manuscript, was relatively inaccessible and has hardly been studied. Much of the other antiquarian material he collected has been lost or is not as yet identified. 16.6.1 Strada’s Artistic Personality Nevertheless the fact remains that Strada is an unusual example of a person combining a serious and sustained scholarly interest in the history and cul- ture of the ancient world with a passionate love and great understanding of the visual arts. This was an unusual, though not unprecedented combina- tion, which was found earlier in Raphael and his pupils—in particular Giulio Romano—and in Sebastiano Serlio: three shining examples who provided the inspiration for Strada’s ambition, and helped him develop his procedures. This combination of interests was also found in other artist-antiquaries who were his more exact contemporaries—such as Pirro Ligorio, Enea Vico and Andrea Palladio—who were steeped in the antiquarian lore as practiced in Rome both before and after the Sack of 1527, as much as Strada himself. It should be said that—unlike Raphael, Giulio and Serlio or Palladio and Pirro Ligorio—Strada was no great artist. His own taste was what one could expect from a pupil of Giulio Romano and of Serlio: he preferred an elegant,