Seite - 530 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 10530 correct solution of piers carrying the arches. Moreover it is difficult to accept that Strada would have agreed with the asymmetrical division of the windows in the west or garden wing, which spoils the monumentality of this otherwise quite grand facade [Fig. 10.12]. And finally the doubled windows, however clas- sically detailed, appear to me to reflect a vernacular tradition: Strada doubtless would have opted for more classical, single, vertically spaced windows, as in his own house and in his design for the Antiquarium. So if Strada was involved in the design of Bučovice, his contribution probably remained limited to its planning, while the actual design of the elevation was left to Pietro Gabri, the North-Italian architect active in Moravia who was actually paid for building Bučovice. 10.5 Christoph von Teuffenbach: The House in Vienna and the Castle at Drnholec Strada’s house functioned as a clearing house for cultural information within the overlapping worlds of courtiers, diplomats, scholars, artists and merchants that made up and surrounded the Imperial court. This function, which will be investigated in greater detail in the next chapter, was of great importance to Strada, probably both for economic reasons and for reasons of personal and family prestige. To emphasize this function he kept a sort of guestbook in which his most important guests, in particular princes and great magnates, were asked to write their name, which he then complemented by a carefully illuminated illustration of their coat of arms. His second son, Ottavio, perhaps imitating this procedure, kept a personal album amicorum or Stammbuch, in which he asked his aristocratic acquaintances to write their names.22 I have often wondered where Strada took the idea of having such a guest book for his Musaeum, and why his son Ottavio, who never studied at a uni- versity, nevertheless kept a Stammbuch, a typically German tradition that had only very recently originated at the Protestant universities.23 I was alerted to a plausible solution by an article by Günther Buchinger, Paul Mitchell and Doris Schön of the Vienna Denkmalamt, which presents the results of their research into the building history of the so-called Concordia house. Situated at nr 8 of the Bankgasse, opposite the Stadtpalais Liechtenstein in Vienna, this was at one time the next-door neighbour but one of the house of Jacopo Strada. Though 22 On Jacopo Strada’s guest book and his son Ottavio’s Stammbuch, see below, Ch. 11.1; Jan- sen 1992, pp. 199–201. 23 On Stammbücher in general, see Fechner 1981; Klose 1982; Klose 1989.