Seite - 318 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 5318 113 On Strada’s house, see below, Ch. 7. 114 Ch. 5.2.1. application was limited to literate and intellectually ambitious artists: it would be out of the range of merely practically trained, illiterate master-masons such as Benedict Kölbl. Certainly it was a manner sufficiently distinct from the ver- nacular to be explicitly recognized as such: thus in a letter to his Venetian cor- respondent Niccolò Stopio Hans Jakob Fugger would describe Strada’s newly built house in Vienna as having ‘una facciata alla Italiana’, a facade in the Ital- ian manner.113 As we have seen, Ferdinand as well as his two elder sons had already dem- onstrated their taste for this manner. Being mostly based on ancient Roman architecture, the style was moreover highly suitable for the projects of the Holy Roman Emperor, who was generally considered the direct successor of the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire. This interest is reflected in details of the Hofburg realized before Strada arrived at court, such as the ornamental plaque commemorating his earliest interventions in the Hofburg [Fig. 5.14] and in the exquisite door- and window frames and relief plaques decorating the earlier, lower part of the Prague Summer Palace [Fig. 5.19], based on a model from Serlio’s Fourth Book [Fig. 5.20], both examples which have been discussed above.114 Some of the masters active in Prague may well have contributed to the proj- ects in hand in Vienna: a particular instance was first noticed by Moriz Dreger, who compared the upper lintels or friezes of the windows in the Prague Sum- mer Palace [Fig. 5.79] with those of the entrance facade of the Vienna Hof- burg, dated 1553 [Fig. 5.80]. They both include oddly crenelated cartouches or plaques, flanked by fire steels and flints, emblems of the order of the Golden Fleece that were doubtless suggested or imposed by Ferdinand himself. This close link—the Vienna window frames are reduced and simplified versions of the Prague ones—suggests that one of the architects engaged on the Summer Figure 5.77 Sebastiano Serlio, Château de Ancy-le-Franc, ca 1545. Figure 5.78 Sebastiano Serlio, Alternative designs for Ancy-le-Franc, in the Munich ms. of the Sesto Libro.