Seite - 823 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 2

823Student of Antiquity Nevertheless, from Strada’s selection and in his representation of the objects included, it appears that his concept of authenticity was rather dif- ferent from ours, and even from that of some of his contemporaries. Though he was quite aware of the existence of very deceptive forgeries, and explicitly warns for these, in practice he was rather uncritical. Thus he included many images and descriptions of coins which appear not to have existed in exactly that form, as was noted even by some of his contemporaries. He may occa- sionally have been taken in by excellent imitations such as Cavino’s, or out- right fakes, but it is more likely that he sometimes inadvertently or deliberately mixed up his drawings and his notes. Thus he ranged among the gold coins a head or a reverse which probably exists only in bronze; he borrowed an in- scription from one coin-type to restore a damaged original of another type; or he combined  obverse and reverse of different coins to come up with a convinc- ing ensemble. It seems that for him true authenticity was to be found in showing the objects as they were in their prime: thus he also restored in pen-and-ink many of the statues included in his manuscript Statuarum antiquarum, and was in- volved in the restorations of the actual marbles he acquired on behalf of the Duke of Bavaria. Moreover, like a humanist philologist intent not only in re- storing an ancient text, but also in emending it to make it more comprehen- sible, Strada thought it quite legitimate to show a coin as it should have been designed, rather than as it was, in order better to convey the ‘grandeur that was Rome’. As a method this is questionable: Strada forgot that the humanist editor always emended later, defective copies, and in his emendation tried to reconstitute the lost original; whereas Strada’s ‘emendation’ improves on the original itself, at the expense of what we would consider the authenticity of his documentation. Figures 15.36–15.38 Details from the ‘Specimen exile’ of Wolfgang Lazius’ planned catalogue of the Imperial coin collection, compared to Strada’s drawing of a reverse of a coin of Vespasian showing a similar round or tetrastyle temple, in his Magnum ac novum opus in Gotha, vol. 5, fol. 41.