Seite - 855 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 2

855Agent of Change: Imperial Antiquary and Architect Strada’s contact strategy: he tended to target patrons whose characteristics conform to those postulated in Rogers’ definition of ‘opinion leaders’, that is patrons who possessed ‘a higher socio-economic status,<…>greater social participation,<…>higher formal education<…>’ and a considerable degree of ‘cosmopoliteness’.36 16.5.7 Was there a Change Agency? According to Rogers’ definition already partially cited above, a change agent ‘influences clients’ innovation-decisions in a direction deemed desirable by a change agency’ [italics mine], that is an ‘agency’ employing the agent delib- erately to introduce a given desirable innovation.37 One should not discount the possibility that even in the Early Modern period a government might have developed a conscious policy—albeit in a rudimentary form—to collect infor- mation about useful novelties from elsewhere, and to find means to dissemi- nate this among its dependents, in order to increase its prestige, its prosperity and its power. Elsewhere I have argued that the Munich complex of collec- tions, as realized by Duke Albrecht v of Bavaria and Hans Jakob Fugger, and theoretically justified in Quiccheberg’s treatise, was in fact primarily consid- ered as a source of information, of knowledge, and was motivated as much by a conviction of its public utility as by more conventionally accepted incentives, such as the private intellectual and aesthetic pleasure of the prince, the need for formal representatio and dynastic propaganda, or the need to express the philosophical correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm.38 This is not the place to argue the existence of a more or less rudimentary cultural policy in Munich or Vienna—but assuming that such a conscious in- tent to foster progress in the arts, sciences and scholarship existed, Strada’s employment first by Fugger, and then by Ferdinand i and Albrecht v, suddenly seems very consistent. Fugger certainly was interested to foster scholarship, as is borne out by his massive moral and financial support of a whole crowd of scholars and scientists and the creation of his huge library; as we have seen he fits the profile of the innovator to a large extent. With a small but choice collec- tion of antiquities, Fugger also inherited an interest in that field from his father. Especially numismatics and its application in scholarship was a relatively new discipline, with some of its roots in Augsburg and Nuremberg itself, but being developed at the time in Italy in the learned circles in which Fugger had moved during his all too brief period of study. For that reason he turned to Strada, 36 Rogers 2003, p. 382 and 388. 37 Rogers 2003, p. 366. 38 Jansen 1993(b), especially pp. 64–68; slightly revised reprints Jansen 2005 and Jansen 2013.