Seite - 187 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

187In Hans Jakob Fugger’s Service necessary means to accomplish his studies, and the ideas current in his circle had provided him with an intellectual frame of reference which would deter- mine a significant proportion of his later activities. He had brought his anti- quarian expertise up to date by his trip to Lyon, where he had published it to the world in his Epitome thesauri antiquitatum, and in Rome. In Rome he had mingled in the most advanced humanist and antiquarian milieu of Europe: his contacts with this circle, and with both the papal court and the households of the princes of the church, in particular that of Alessandro Cardinal Farnese, provided him with the learned urbanity that made him eligible to the place he would shortly afterwards occupy at the principal secular court of Christianity. Strada’s travels had also equipped him with an up to date expertise in the visual arts of Italy, at the time the trendsetter in Europe, and he had built up an extraordinary collection of visual documentation both of ancient and con- temporary art that would enable him to pass on this expertise to both patrons and artists that visited his studio. His collection or ‘Musaeum’ would moreover serve as a stock of inventions drawn upon for the materials that were produced in his workshop on behalf of his patrons: chiefly Hans Jakob Fugger, Duke Al- brecht v of Bavaria and the Emperors Ferdinand i and Maximilian ii. Probably the network of personal acquaintances and correspondents he had created included many others—fellow merchants, booksellers, bankers—that would come in useful for the commercial aspects of his activities.