Seite - 418 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 8418 is found in the Pescheria, the Mantua fish market, also built by Bertani basing himself on Giulio’s designs, and in many later buildings in the region. The direct source for Strada’s encased semicolumns, on the other hand, are probably those articulating the top floor of Ammanati’s garden facade of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. In Strada’s drawing only one of these is worked out, the others show that he constructed them just as Ammanati had done, from superimposed square blocks of rough stone alternately cut away to the col- umn’s shaft—a technique which can also be found in Giulio’s work, such as the Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza [Figs. 8.33–8.35].50 By the 1560s most of these elements were part of the general stock-in-trade of Italian and Italianate alrchitects, and it is only in the composition of these conventional elements that Strada’s Antiquarium design shows any originality, or rather eccentricity. Eccentricity in a literal sense: although having repeated- ly and also recently revisited his native Italy, Strada had spent the greater part of his professional life in travel and had been settled abroad for close on thirty years. It is not surprising that the one unusual element in his facade betrays 50 Perhaps Strada intended the unfinished, squarely cut version as a possible alternative, in the manner of the Palazzo Pitti’s first floor. Strada’s source may have been Sansovino’s much earlier Zecca at Venice (1537–1545). Figure 8.32 Giulio Romano and Giovanni Battista Bertani, Cortile della Mostra, Mantua, Palazzo Ducale (1556).