Seite - 25 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

25The Image—Or from Whom (Not?) to Buy a Second-Hand Car abroad, rather than as numismatist.47 Perhaps the only really scholarly ap- preciation of his antiquarian work in this field appeared already in 1869, in Emil Hübner’s introductory note to the edition in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum of a selection of Latin inscriptions from Spain which Strada had added, probably as an afterthought, to his edition of Caesar’s Commentaries of 1575. Though he has an open mind about Strada—‘homo minime doctus, sed callidus rerum antiquarum indagator’—he clearly does not accept him as a serious scholar. Nevertheless he is the first to cite not only Strada’s numis- matic albums, but also the other manuscript materials preserved in the Öster- reichische Nationalbibliothek, including Strada’s testament and the list of the books he intended to publish. Hübner apparently tried to identify the book containing over five thousand inscriptions Strada claimed to have collected, but finally had to be satisfied with guessing at the provenance of the Spanish inscriptions included in Strada’s Caesar edition.48 0.9 Contemporary Scholarship 0.9.1 History of Art and Cultural History Whereas Strada’s numismatic publications do not excite the interest of mod- ern archaeologists, they do attract scholarly attention of those interested in the reception of classical Antiquity in the Renaissance. An early example is the German art historian Paul Ortwin Rave, who places Strada’s treatise within an old and continuing tradition for which he coined the term Bildnisvitenbücher, that is books in which the lives of illustrious heroes from the past were illus- trated by a portrait, from which, it was held, their characters could be inferred. Since these images were often derived from true or spurious ancient coins (the Roman Emperors are obvious examples), a woodcut or engraved medallion be- came the accepted format for such portraits even of those heroes whose like- ness had certainly never graced a coin or medal.49 Such ‘portraits of the past’ are the point of departure for Francis Haskell’s wonderful book on the role of the image in our conception of the past, History and its images of 1991. In its very first chapter, ‘The Early Numismatists’, Strada’s Epitome thesauri antiquita- tum is discussed in detail, and in the following chapter it is linked to his part in 47 Cochrane 1981, pp. 350–351. Presumably because Cochrane limited his discussion to books published in Italy, Strada does not figure among the Italian numismatists listed in the chapter on the study of antiquities. 48 Hübner 1869, pp. ix–x. 49 Rave 1959, pp. 150–152.