Seite - 377 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

377An Object Lesson Nevertheless he took a lot of trouble to illustrate the house in detail, either because he hoped he thus could sell another copy of his print series to its pro- prietor, or because he recognized its unusual design. He had to practice some pictorial licence to show its facade on the Schenkenstrasse, in reality paral- lel to the facade of the Palais Liechtenstein; for compositional reasons he also changed its proportions, making the house almost as high as the Liechtenstein palace itself, while in reality it was rather lower [cf. Fig. 7.8]. Given that the house is thus used merely as a frame for the more important palace, and is shown in extreme foreshortening, it is remarkable how much care Kleiner took to reproduce its architectural design: an indication that the print can be used as a reliable source for the appearance of the facade at that time. This is even more notable in Kleiner’s original drawing, preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek [Figs. 7.9 and 7.11].20 Because of its ex- treme foreshortening this is difficult to read, but nevertheless it shows suffi- cient detail to get a very good idea of what the architecture looked like. This is supplemented and corrected by Kleiner’s drawing of the neighbouring palace of countess Althan-Pignatelli: here the baroque palace is framed by narrow strips of the facades of the neighbouring houses, both originally built in the 1560s, by Christoph von Teuffenbach on the right, and by Jacopo Strada on the left hand side [Fig. 7.12].21 From these two images it appears that in 1725 the house had a strictly classi- cal facade of three stories: two stories articulated by very flat coupled pilasters over a rustic story of bossed masonry articulated by blind arcades filled with windows carried on brackets. As in the Stallburg courtyard, the orders are ex- tremely simplified and undefined, and here the entablatures are incomplete, that of the first floor lacking its cornice, that of the second floor lacking its frieze. On the basis of the drawings Mario Carpo has prepared a tentative re- construction of the facade on the Vordere Schenkenstrasse [Figs. 7.13 and 7.10 (detail)].22 From this it is evident that this cannot be a facade conceived in the Vienna of the Baroque. Its close relationship with Roman palace architecture 20 önb-hs, Cod. min. 9, Bd. 1, f. 12 21 önb-hs, Cod. min. 9, Bd 1, f. 14. The facade of the Teuffenbach house was later remodelled, and it is this baroque version that is visible in the print; but its structure still largely dates back to the 1560s, cf. Buchinger / Mitchell / Schön 2006. 22 The reconstruction was made in close consultation as an illustration to a paper read at the Serlio conference in Vicenza in 1987 (Jansen 1989, p. 211, pl. 7) and was republished in Jansen 1988, p. 136, pl. 6, and in Louthan 1997, p. 34, pl. 4. I am very grateful to Dr Carpo for having taken the trouble and for having given me the benefit of his expertise.