Seite - 102 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 2102 been living and working in Germany at least since 1544 and was married to a German noblewoman: reason enough to have begun appreciating the arts of his adoptive country. In fact he had become sufficiently appreciative of these to leave at his death a ‘big book bound with gold’ which contained ‘the greater part of the printed designs of that great man Albrecht Dürer, both those in copper engraving and those in woodcut, and there are 216 sheets in all, all of prime quality’.75 All this seems to justify the hypothesis that Strada provided Jamnitzer with designs for the Tafelaufsatz, or at least for one or more of its elements. As Rainer Schoch has pointed out, the Visierung consists of five separate sheets, each of which corresponds to one of the elements constituting the object. The lack of stylistic unity between these sheets made Schoch suspect that here, as in the course of other phases of the production of the Tafelaufsatz, Jamnitzer employed various ‘specialists’.76 Whereas Jamnitzer himself, or another of his ‘specialists’, provided the naturalistic and metallic elements of the piece, Stra- da would have been the specialist who provided Jamnitzer with the Italianate design for the caryatid figure, representing Ceres or Abundantia [Fig. 2.26]. This supposition becomes a virtual certainty when one compares the Ceres of the Tafelaufsatz with a Diana, the drawing of a character in a joust or masque at the Imperial court for which Strada designed the costumes some years lat- er.77 [Fig. 2.25] Though the coarseness of the draughtsmanship of this element of the Visierung shows it is due to one of Jamnitzer’s (German) assistants, it seems very likely that he copied a Strada design. The female type is exactly the same as in Strada’s Diana: note the elegant profile of both faces; the place- ment of the eyes, the rather muscular shoulders and arms, the limp grasp of the hands, and the rather heavy knee-joints. Moreover the manner of drawing is very similar, both in the outlines and in the shading. That Strada collaborated on the design of the Tafelaufsatz reinforces the supposition that he also furnished designs for other works from Jamnitzer’s workshop. That Jamnitzer’s designs seem to be closer to Primaticcio than to, for instance, Giulio Romano, in itself corresponds to Jacopo’s own stylistic persona. In any case the link is to Mantuan examples, which Jamnitzer could have got to know thanks to the drawings and prints among his neighbour’s 75 Ottavio Strada to Prospero Visconti, Praga, 1 November 1590, Firenze, asf, Medici del Prin- cipato 825, fol. 317, ‘un grande libro ligato con oro’ in which ‘<…> sonno li maggior parte delli disegni stampati di quel valenthuomo Alberto Durero, cusì quelli in rame, come quelli in legno, et sonno da 216 pezzi; et tutti sonno delle prime stampe’. 76 In den hellsten Farben 2003, cat. nr. 11, pp. 38–39. 77 önb-hs, Cod. min. 21,3, fol.41; this particular figure cannot be assigned with certainty to any of the known festivals at court; cf. below, Ch. 4.3.4.