Seite - 225 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

225Tasks at the Imperial Court the other hand it may well be that Strada referred to the project and aired any misgivings he may have had. In any case the project was discussed again, per- haps even in a meeting which included the Emperor himself as well as his three consultants—Schallautzer, Ferrabosco and Strada—and the painter. The dis- cussion resulted in the reduction of the number of compartments from sixty- three to thirty-five, including a central compartment with the Imperial coat of arms. This change allowed more space to each of the—fewer—individual scenes: the consequent larger scale of the figures resulted in more monumen- tal compositions, while the less cluttered architectonic order of the ceiling in- creased the monumental character of the decorative scheme as a whole. It is very tempting to attribute the initiative for this change to Strada, who was best acquainted with these qualities as present in recent developments in Italy and, as we have seen, could support his point of view by the graphic documentation contained in his Musaeum. 4.3.5 Another Example: Contribution to the Organisation and Design of Festivals Strada’s contribution to the design of the ceiling of the Goldene Saal is docu- mented by at least one formal document from its patron’s archives. This is not the case for his possible contribution to the realization of the various festivities that were organized at the Imperial court in his time, though at present it is accepted that he must have been at least occasionally involved in these.71 The most tangible reason for this supposition is the set of festival designs from Stra- da’s workshop that have been preserved among his miscellaneous papers in the third volume of the Codex miniatus 21 in the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. One of these, an elegantly dressed-up elephant, is provided with an annotation in the hand of Ottavio Strada: ‘the elephant was dressed for the wedding of Archduke Charles, invention of my father’ [Fig. 4.13].72 71 Basic information on the festivities at the court of the Austrian Habsburgs in Wir sind Helden 2005, which provided an extensive, yet incomplete bibliography of earlier liter- ature (pp. 171–176), in which Strada is not mentioned. Strada’s contributions generally discussed the context of his few preserved costume designs and their relation to Arcim- boldo’s: Kaufmann 1978<a>, Chs. i–iii; O’Dell 1990; Kaufmann 2009, pp. 78–80; Kaufmann 2010; Kárpáti 2012. 72 ‘Così fu vestito l’Elephante per le nozze del Ser.mo Archiduca Carlo, inventione di mio padre’; the festival drawings are found in önb-hs, Cod. Min. 21,3, fols. 316/33–343/60 (interspersed with a few antiquarian drawings); the elephant is found on fol. 366/74. It should be noted that it is not certain that these volumes belong to the former holdings of the Vienna Hofbibliothek, much less to Rudolf’s Kunstkammer, as a note on fol. 460/190 of this volume refers to an earlier owner of at least part of the material: ‘Seindt in disen Buch gerissen Pletter und Khunstuckh <sic> Pey Hand 230 Stuckh. 1629. Jars / CS <for