Page - 867 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

867Agent of Change: Imperial Antiquary and Architect Panvinio, Pirro Ligorio and Enea Vico; in Mantua: Giovanni Battista Bertani, Giovanni Battista Scultori and Ippolito Andreasi; in Venice: Titian, Tintoretto and Alessandro Vittoria; in Vienna: Martino Rota; and in Frankfurt Andreas Wechel and Sigmund Feyerabend. Strada’s active talent spotting is mirrored by his extensive network of contacts, described in Chapter 11. His personal status as a nobleman, his rec- ommendations from the Gonzaga Dukes, and at least some financial indepen- dence even in his early days, all were necessary conditions to build up this network. But his personal talents, his curiosity, his cosmopolitan attitude and his self-confidence must have played at least as large a role. It was this that obtained him the patronage of such an extraordinary man as Hans Jakob Fug- ger; it was this that helped him to wed his noble bride; it was this that allowed him not only to attend the 1548 Imperial Diet at Augsburg, but also to land an important commission from one of Charles v’s principal supporters. It is clear that Strada sought such contacts actively, for the input they provided— knowledge, ideas, materials and further contacts—as well as for the output they allowed, by providing patrons to pay for the projects he planned, and an audience to insure their reception. Such active talent spotting and deliberate networking in the places Strada visited or where he settled, best show how consciously and conscientiously Strada attempted to disseminate the knowledge, the ideas and the artistic forms he admired. This is the principal reason why he is of significance for the cultural history of the sixteenth century: because he stimulated the awareness of the connection between classical erudition and the visual arts, and because he carried the paradigm of the pre-eminence of the classical example and of the Vitruvian precept in architecture for contemporary artistic creation across the Alps. Just as Serlio did in France, he propagated this paradigm in Central Europe, and stressed its suitability for local use. Like Serlio, he popularized the concept and the forms in which it was expressed among a select group of patrons, potential ‘opinion leaders’ and ‘early adopters’. He did this by bodily carrying both classical and contemporary examples with him, thus transform- ing his patrons’ collections and his own into centres of diffusion both of the antique example, and of the new style that was inspired by it. He did this by making available his huge collection of documentation of authoritative ex- amples from Antiquity, and of equally canonical contemporary achievements that had been inspired by it; and he did this by the example of his own designs. Last but not least, he did this most of all by his comments and explanations on all of these. There can be no doubt that some of Strada activities—in particular the ‘traffic’ in antiquities and works of art—were partly motivated by commercial