Seite - 373 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

373An Object Lesson Strada had consciously modelled his house upon the palazzi of his native country, telling his old friend Jacopo Dani, secretary of the Grand duke of Tuscany, that he hoped to show a Florentine visitor ‘la mia casa, la quale puol star al pari di una di q<u>elle belle d’Italia’. In the eyes both of Duke Alfonso of Ferrara and of the humanist Languet, the Italian, classical manner of Stra- da’s house distinguished it favourably from other Vienna dwellings in a less advanced or vernacular style. It was intended as a sample of up-to-date, Ital- ian, cosmopolitan architecture: a conscious, three-dimensional statement of the principles of humanist architecture expressed in the designs and writings collected in Strada’s studio, and an attempt to propagate these in his second fatherland. It is therefore unfortunate that the house, that had largely survived, was demolished in the context of the construction of the Ringstrasse, the am- ple new boulevard that was planned to circle the inner city after demolition of the Vienna fortifications around 1860 [Fig. 7.3]. Unfortunately the significance of the house was not remarked at the time, so no documentation appears to have been made of it before its destruction. Yet careful examination of the older topographic images that have survived does allow a tentative description and partial reconstruction of the building. The only more or less factual description of the building is a brief mention in a letter from Hans Jakob Fugger to Niccolò Stopio, of 6 December 1567: Figure 7.5 Daniel Suttinger, town plan of Vienna at the time of the second Turkish siege, 1683, detail. Figure 7.6 Daniel Suttinger, bird’s eye view of Vienna during the 1683 siege, detail.