Seite - 778 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 2

Chapter 14778 the documentary drawings of the principal monuments of Mantua he had earlier obtained through Giovanni Battista Bertani, Giovanni Battista Scultori and Ippolito Andreasi, and now begged the Duke to help him obtain similar documentation on the decoration of the Palazzo Ducale and the Gonzaga vil- la at Marmirolo. As we have seen, the Duke appears to have honoured Strada’s request, since Andreasi’s drawings of the Palazzo Ducale were in fact executed and have been preserved together with those of the Palazzo del Te Strada had commissioned in 1567.118 Strada assured the Duke that there was nothing remarkable in his homeland (‘patria’) that he would not include in the book, and in particular as to architecture. But notwithstanding such chauvinism, it is hardly likely that he really intended to reproduce all of Andreasi’s drawings in his edition of Alberti’s Descrittione. For that book the elevations and plans of the principal monuments—similar to those of the Palazzo Pitti [above, Fig. 13.118–13.119] or the Duomo in Florence preserved in the Strahov Codex [above, Fig. 13.23]—would be sufficient, with possibly one or two of the most spectacular interiors (such as the Camera di Psiche or the Camera dei Giganti). On the other hand he did think that such material could be published as sepa- rate publications, as is clear from the descriptions of these sets of drawings and of those of Raphael’s Vatican Loggia in the Index sive catalogus [items 41 and 42]. In his letter to Plantin Strada added some information about the practical aspects of his projected edition of Alberti’s Description of Italy. Thus most of the views of the various cities were already engraved in wood or, if the blocks had not yet been cut, the designs had already been drawn directly onto the blocks for the engraver, in a uniform size similar to the small landscapes in- cluded in Strada’s 1575 edition of Caesar’s Commentaries [above, Fig. 14.23– 14.24]. He suggested that the maps of the individual regions, which should be of a larger size, could best be executed in copper engraving. Most of the coats of arms were already engraved, and the rest could be easily done in Antwerp, where there were far more and better engravers than in Vienna. It seems clear that in most cases Strada had drawn the models onto the woodblocks in per- son: at least that is what he offered to do for all the illustrations that had not yet been engraved, both for the Descrittione and for the other works he proposes to Plantin. For one other item, the illustrations of portrait busts of Emperors and their consorts, item 6 of the Index sive catalogus, Strada gave a practical sugges- tion: the portrait heads or busts themselves should be engraved in copper, but the pedestals for all could be printed from one woodblock, in which a space was kept open in which to compose the legends in letterpress; an impression of 118 Above, Ch. 13.8.2.