Seite - 202 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 4202 a long letter to Martin de Guzmán.23 From these letters it appears that Stra- da had sent back the material neatly sewn into a piece of vellum, so that no sheets would be lost, and that he had written his corrections of the errors it contained—of which there were many more than he had thought at first—in the margins. He criticised Lazius for not having read the lettering of the coins correctly, and therefore having misinterpreted a great many of them. Moreover the order Lazius had adopted bordered on the chaotic: he had mixed up coins of the Roman Kings with those of the Consuls, and those of the Consuls with those of the Emperors. In fact he strongly doubted that either Lazius or his engraver understood the material at all: I am certain that Doctor Lazius cannot read them; and neither can the artist who works the copperplates. Because if they would understand them, they would not range the medals of the Kings of Rome among those of the Consuls, nor those of the Consuls with those of the Emper- ors; and neither would they exchange those of the Emperors, putting those that belong to one Emperor under another. And they would not commit so many errors, such as using the same medal several times, in different places. In future they are certain to commit [even] greater [er- rors], because the matter becomes more difficult the more one advances [in time]. So that I leave it to Your Lordship to judge what a beautiful thing they will produce; and if it ever sees the light, it may well be that every man of judgment will make jokes about it—not considering the expense they will have caused His Majesty. Strada offered to undertake the necessary correction, provided that he would be given the credit: ‘I would not want to be tutor to Doctor Lazius, for him to gain laurels with my corrections’. He then outlined to Guzmán, who had asked him to write ‘l’historia de una hovero dua medaglie’, the interpretation of one or two medals, how such a work ought to be put together. It should not be conceived as an object-catalogue, extensively describing and interpreting each individual coin, which would obviously entail constant repeating of mat- ter, but ‘per ordine come seguita la historia’, that is as a chronological series of towns, Kings, Consuls and Emperors who had issued coinage, under whom the individual coin should be classed and described. Strada mentioned his own Epitome thesauri antiquitatum as an example, and it must be conceded that this system—which Strada had not invented himself—soon became the norm and is still adhered to in numismatic corpora of our own time. He also paid particular attention to the illustrations: he could easily teach the engraver how 23 DOCS. 1558-02-21<a> and 1558-02-21<b>, the latter given in appendix 3a.