Seite - 142 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 3142 3.5.3 Strada’s Contacts in Lyon: Collectors of Antiquities There is a superficial resemblance between Rouillé’s Promptuaire and Strada’s Epitome thesauri antiquitatum, which appeared in the same year. Yet Strada ob- viously cherished more scholarly ambitions: he limited himself to the Roman Emperors, who certainly had issued coins which could actually be found. He explicitly stated that he only included images of those rulers of which he had in fact seen an original coin (however spurious to our more critical judgment). Though he probably met many members of Lyon’s intellectual milieu, we only know about those he had met in the course of his numismatic researches, the collectors of antiquities, for whom coins and medals were the most informa- tive, affordable and easily available items.63 From the provenances given with the descriptions of coins in Strada’s manuscript A.A.A. Numismatωn Διασκευέ we can identify some of the collectors Strada visited. Chief among these was the antiquary Guillaume du Choul, conseiller du roi and bailli of the Dauphiné. In his house La Madeleine, which was situated in the Montée du Gourguillon in the old part of the city, on the right bank of the Saône, he had brought together a celebrated collection of antiquities, and he published a number of learned studies of various aspects of Roman civilization.64 Strada describes his contacts with Du Choul in the preface of his Epitome thesauri antiquitatum: 63 For a good account of numismatic studies and collections of coins and medals in Lyon, see Guillemain 1993. 64 On Du Choul, see: Copley Christie 1880, pp. 25–30; Cooper 1988, pp. 170–173; Bruyère 1993, pp. 91 and 109–110; Guillemain 2003; Guillemain 2008; Margolin 1974, p. 182, gives a Figures 3.52–3.54 Guillaume Rouillé, Promptuaire des medalles des plus renommées personnes, Lyon 1553: title page and biographies and medallic portraits of Semiramis, Zameis, Abraham and Sarah.