Seite - 340 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 6340 6.1 The Hofspital The first documented instance of Strada’s involvement in projects at court dates already from a year earlier, shortly after he had arrived in Vienna. The Hofspital or Kaiserspital, a charitable institution under the particular patron- age of Queen Anna of Hungary and of Ferdinand himself that was located next to the Hofburg [nr 5 on the plan in Fig. 5.72] had been begun already in 1549, after a model designed by Sigismund de Preda, who presumably died shortly afterwards. Since then, all sorts of problems had held up its completion. On 20 October 1558 a model for its arcades, provided by Benedikt Kölbl, was the subject of a careful consultation between the Emperor himself, his Bausuper- intendent Schallautzer, his court-painter and architect Pietro Ferrabosco and the recent arrival, Jacopo Strada. This commission approved Kölbl’s plans, and the building was realized under Kölbl’s direction in the following years.2 The Kaiserspital was very largely remodelled in the eighteenth century, and the little we know of its original appearance comes from a photograph tak- en during its demolition in 1903, when the original arcades of the courtyard became visible again, and from the measurements taken at the time by Ru- dolf Pichler, who used them for a set of reconstruction drawings [Fig. 6.1]. His 2 On the Hofspital, see: Pichler 1904; Kühnel 1958, pp. 314–315, 317–318 and 324; Kühnel 1971, pp. 37–38 and Fig. 6; Nowotny 1978; Wandruszka / Reininghaus 1984, pp. 16–32;Grün 2014. Figure 6.� Rudolf Pichler, Reconstruction of the arcades of the Kaiserspital based on measurements made shortly before its demolition in 1903.