Seite - 280 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 5280 54 He may have seen the preserved Roman ramparts of Tongeren in Belgium, but these, though authentic, can hardly be called imposing. through Cremona and Lodi to Milan. In all these places he only remained one or two days, even at Milan. From there he travelled to Genoa, where he stayed for five days in the seaside villa, the Palazzo del Principe, at Fassolo just outside the city gates [Fig. 5.18]. As we have seen, this light-hearted, airy villa with its splendid decoration and luscious garden had been built in the 1530s by Perino del Vaga for Andrea Doria, who commanded the fleet that brought Maximil- ian and his train to Spain. On his return to Augsburg in November-December 1550, and both ways on his trip to accompany his wife and children home from Spain (respectively in June and in November of 1551) he always took this same route, roughly in the same tempo. He never returned to Italy afterwards, and he never saw Venice, Florence or Rome, let alone Turin and Naples. He seems even to have bypassed Verona and its Arena on all four occasions, missing out on the one monumental example of the architecture of Ancient Rome he con- veniently might have seen standing.54 So his first-hand experience of first-rate contemporary Italian architecture remained limited to Giulio’s work at Man- tua and the patrician palaces of Milan—among which Domenico Giunti’s Villa Simonetta, built for Maximilian’s host, Ferrante Gonzaga [below, Ch. 9.10.3, Figs. 9.90–9.91]—and Genoa; it excluded even Sanmicheli’s palaces at Verona. This seems not very much; nevertheless it appears to have been sufficient for a Figure 5.32 Sebastiano Serlio, the Arch of the Gavii at Verona, from the first edition of his Terzo libro, Venice 1540. Figure 5.33 Donato de’ Boni, Imperial Gate, Antwerp, ca 1545, contemporary woodcut.