Seite - 39 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

39The Image—Or from Whom (Not?) to Buy a Second-Hand Car to the fact that he was not a locally established publisher, but had his books printed in three different countries. Another strange lacuna in scholarship is Strada’s role in the creative process of Wenzel Jamnitzer’s workshop. In view of the available documents, printed already in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is inconceivable and unjustifiable that his name does not appear even once in the recent detailed, three volume survey of the history of Nuremberg goldsmith’s work, an omis- sion the less explicable since recent scholarship has at least indicated some intimations of his possible importance in this field.99 Other themes may not have been taken up because their intrinsic interest seems not to recompense the quantity of work—and expense—involved: the best example is Strada’s Magnum ac novum Opus, the corpus of over nine thou- sand numismatic drawings preserved at Gotha. In spite of the fame it enjoyed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it has only recently been the sub- ject of a preliminary material investigation.100 The modest quality of most of the drawings as works of art would not soon invite art-historical interest, and their value for modern numismatic studies is limited. They could, however, be of interest as documents of the intellectual preoccupations and scholarly procedure of the sixteenth century: for that reason the Deutsche Forschun- gsgemeinschaft dfg has decided to fund a project to digitize both Strada’s coin-images in Gotha—which are already accessible on-line—and his related coin-descriptions.101 0.11 Weaving the Strands Together: The Purpose of this Study It is clear that most available information on Strada comes from specialized publications, which illustrate only one or at most a few aspects of his career. 99 Only Ralf Schürer has explicitly wondered what Strada’s role may have been: Schürer 1986 p. 58; cf. below, Ch. 2.5. 100 Fürstliche Bücherlust 2004, pp.42–45; Kulturkosmos der Renaissance 2008, cat.nr. 94, pp. 262–263; Diemer/Diemer/Sauerländer 2008, nr. 5–34. 101 Jacopo Strada‘s Magnum ac Novum Opus: A Sixteenth-Century Numismatic Corpus, dfg- funded project at the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt, in collaboration with the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha and the Census of Antique Works of Art and Ar- chitecture known in the Renaissance, Berlin; conducted by Volker Heenes and the pres- ent author, supervised by Martin Mulsow. The images of the Strada volumes in Gotha are accessible through the Digitale Historische Bibliothek Erfurt-Gotha: https://archive .thulb.uni-jena.de/ufb/servlets/solr/ufb2?q=Strada.; selected images and texts are en- tered in the Documents file of the Census, where they are related to existing ancient coins in the Monuments file; they are planned to become publicly accessible by the end of 2018.