Seite - 381 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

381An Object Lesson the ground level, and an order of the flattest of pilasters on piano nobile and top floor. Moreover these orders are topped by entablatures that are incom- plete: that of the piano nobile lacks its cornice and that of on the top floor its frieze, and there the capitals are integrated in the architrave. Even more than the courtyard of the Stallburg this ‘abbreviated’ order recalls Roman pal- aces designed by Raphael and his school, in particular the Palazzo Alberini- Cicciaporci (ca 1517–1519, Raphael, assisted by Giulio Romano) [Fig. 7.16] and Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Stati-Maccarani (ca 1522–1525) [Fig. 7.17]. Strada’s dependence on the example of his earliest and most admired mas- ter was a conscious choice. He pointedly wished to present an antithesis to local traditions, an alternative based on the examples constructed by the rulers of the Roman Empire, whose history and works he had studied so assiduously, and whose direct successor he was so proud to serve. These examples included also those works produced in his native country under the immediate influ- ence of the renewed study of Antiquity, some of which equalled or even sur- passed those of the Ancients, such as those of Raphael and Giulio. It remains unclear why—among the options he had even within Giulio’s oeuvre—Strada opted for a restrained style the intellectual sophistication of which can hardly have been appreciated by his Vienna contemporaries, in- stead of for a more immediately spectacular, more robust manner for which he could find examples among the works of Michelangelo, Sansovino, Palladio or Sanmicheli. It may have been merely a question of taste: he may have preferred its refined elegance. But possibly his preference for simplicity and sobriety in architecture—which seems to conflict with other aspects of his personality as we know it from, for instance, the Titian portrait—indicates that he shared the Figure 7.16 Serlio, design for a townhouse on a ‘noble’ location, from Strada’s edition of the Settimo Libro, 1575.