Seite - 158 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 3158 would have been fundamentally different in character. The Rome of Paul iii and Julius iii was to all standards a very fertile and lively artistic milieu, thanks to the patronage of the Farnese and that of their partisans and rivals. Thanks also to the presence of Michelangelo and many other gifted artists who had either finally returned to the capital after their flight of 1527—such as Perino del Vaga—or who had come to study both the exempla of classical Rome and the achievements of their justly celebrated contemporaries: next to Michelangelo and Perino one thinks of Antonio da Sangallo, Daniele da Volter- ra, Pirro Ligorio, Francesco Salviati, Prospero Fontana, Guglielmo della Porta, Bartolommeo Ammanati and Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola. But Rome was also a very lively intellectual milieu, though of a new serious- ness caused not so much by the trauma of the Sack, as by the need to find an effective response to Luther and the German Reformation. Classical, historical and antiquarian studies occupied a central place in the preoccupations of this milieu. Considering philological and historical studies as indispensable tools in interpreting Scripture and patristic literature, it warmly welcomed any en- deavour that shed more light on the history of the Roman Empire, and implic- itly on that of the Early Church. Several other reasons can be adduced why the interest in Classical studies was particularly strong in Rome. The chief single factor was the presence in Rome of so many of the physical remains of Roman civilisation, often of quite outstanding quality and beauty, and of a grandeur that flattered the campanilismo surviving in the cosmopolitan culture of Papal Rome.83 Moreover such interest was continuously kept awake by new spectac- ular discoveries, often of great interest both for artistic and erudite reasons: the find in 1546 of the Fasti Capitolini easily excited as much enthusiasm among scholars as that of the Laocoön had done among artists and dilettanti. Contacts between scholars and artists were unusually close at this time, as is evident in the erudite Vitruvianism of the informal Accademia Romana. Re-founded in 1542 by members of the circle of Cardinal Marcello Cervini [Fig.  3.89], it included artists such as Pirro Ligorio. Its method largely parallels the philological procedure of the humanists. Its researches can be interpreted as the quest for an absolute, classical authority: just like correct Latin should be based on the study of canonical classical texts, all serious artistic endeav- our was to be guided by a correct edition of Vitruvius, supported and eluci- dated by careful study of the remnants of architecture from the best periods of Antiquity, in particular of certain canonical buildings such as the Pantheon, 83 D’Amico 1983.