Seite - 81 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

81Travel—Wenzel Jamnitzer applied to Rudolf ii to add name and coat of arms of his mother’s extinct fam- ily to his own.29 The first unequivocal proof of Strada’s presence in Germany, however, only dates from 1 November 1546, when the Council of Nuremberg inquired into his activities as an artist; the next day he was officially authorized to keep his own house, which implies that he had already been present in Nuremberg for some time.30 Some years later, on the 13th of March 1549, and after payment of a fee of 4 gulden, he obtained the citizenship of the town. In spite of occasional ab- sences, some of which were of considerable length, Nuremberg would remain his basis of operation for well over a decade. It is not clear why Strada chose to settle in Nuremberg rather than in Augs- burg, the residence of Hans Jakob Fugger, his principal patron in the 1540s and early 1550s. Perhaps the close connections of the town’s ancient and powerful patriciate with the landed aristocracy of the surrounding region, to which his wife belonged, made it easier for him to gain admittance and to obtain the sup- port he needed for his projects. If he had left Italy because of heterodox religious opinions, he may have been attracted by the city’s uncompromising adherence to the Reformation. But other factors will have been of greater importance: with about thirty thousand inhabitants the old Imperial Reichsstadt was, after Cologne, the second largest city of the Empire, and one of the wealthiest mer- cantile centres of Europe. Sitting as a spin in a web consisting of the great towns of Southern and Central Germany—Regensburg, Frankfurt, Augsburg—it was situated on the crossroads of the great trading routes: those from the North, from Saxony and beyond, to the South, to Bavaria and across the Brenner to Italy and through Swabia and Switzerland to Lyon; and those from the East, from Prague and beyond and from the Habsburg court at Vienna along the Danube, to the West, through the Rhineland onward to Strasbourg and Paris, and to Cologne and Antwerp. Its merchants travelled widely and maintained extensive contacts throughout Europe, its manufacturers and craftsmen pro- duced high quality merchandise that was exported all over the Empire and be- yond. Though lacking both bishop and university, it had considerable renown in the world of learning, which it chiefly owed to humanists such as Hartmann Schedel, Willibald Pirckheimer and other Nuremberg lawyers—most of whom 29 Rudolf ii confirmed Ottavio’s nobility and granting him the righ to add the arms of his mother’s extinct familty to his own on 18 May 1598 (JdKS 15, 1894, ii, pp. clviii–clix, Re- gest nr. 12420). Strada himself never used the name Rossberg or Rosberg (which indicates that the fief itself was no longer part of his wife’s heritage). Jacopo’s and Ottavio’s lineal descendants survive in France as Strada d’Arosberg, a name due to a misunderstanding of Ottavio’s signature, Strada da Rosberg [Pascuito 1978; Chabot de l’Allier 1990]. 30 Docs. 1546-11-01, 1566-11-02.