Seite - 129 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

129In Hans Jakob Fugger’s Service Figures 3.24–3.25 Jacopo Strada, pages from the Magnum ac novum opus: Chapter title and abbreviated biography of Julius Caesar preceding the drawings of his coinage. Why did Fugger so highly value these drawings? Hardly for their merit as works of art—in any case rather modest—for in that case Fugger, though an important patron of learning, but no great patron of the visual arts, would have been as advanced in his tastes and insights as those very few Italian collectors of drawings of which Giorgio Vasari is the best known. But Fugger was very much aware of the value of such visual material as a vehicle of exact informa- tion, information which could not be conveyed by words alone. This awareness he shared with many of his contemporaries, as is shown by the remarkable development in those years of the quantity and quality of the illustrations of scientific books or practical and theoretical manuals: the beautiful engravings from Titian’s studio in Vesalius’ De Fabrica Corporis Humana, and the first well- illustrated architectural treatises (Serlio, Vignola) come to mind. Such illustra- tion, however, was extremely expensive, and therefore only feasible when large p. 331, n. 13, are in the British Museum, mss. Arundel 65, i–iv. A resume of the contents made when part of the volumes were sent to Munich in 1566 gives a total of 6171 drawings (Hartig 1917), Beilage xii, 7 (pp. 324–328). Their description opened the inventory of the Munich Kunstkammer by Johann Baptist Fickler of 1598, published in Diemer 2004, nrs. 1–34 and 36–37, pp. 41–43; its commentary volumes provide further information: Diemer/ Diemer/Sauerländer 2008, 1, pp. 1–6, and they were illustrated and briefly described in an exhibition catalogue on the history of the Munich Staatsbibliothek, Kulturkosmos der Renaissance 2008, cat. nr. 93 and 94, pp. 260–263.