Jacopo Strada

Who was Jacopo Strada?

Jacopo Strada was an Italian polymath courtier of the 16th century, a painter, architect, goldsmith, inventor of machines, numismatist, linguist, collector and merchant of works of art. His portrait by Titian has kept his image familiar.

He is supposed to have received early training as a goldsmith in the Mantua workshops of Giulio Romano; drawings of Giulio's Palazzo del Tè and of its painted interiors and those of the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua, datable 1567-68, are attributed to Jacopo Strada, intended for his Descrizione di tutta Italia. From 1552 to 1555 he sojourned in Lyon and travelled to Rome in the service of Pope Paul III, and after his death his successor Marcellus II, upon whose sudden death he returned north. From 1556 onwards he settled at Vienna and from 1576 served as an official artist and architect to three successive Habsburg Holy Roman emperors, Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolph II. He also worked for Albert V, Duke of Bavaria, for whom he conceived the Antiquarium to house the antiquities at the Munich Residenz; the Roman sculptures that he assembled for the Duke may still be seen in the setting he devised there.

He also served as the friend and trusted agent of the Augsburg patrician, humanist and book-collector, and a friend and advisor of Albrecht, the immensely rich Jakob Fugger, for whom he scouted works of art in Italy from his headquarters in Mantua. On Fugger's commission he assembled a comprehensive array of coats of arms of Italian nobility, filling fifteen volumes, for Fugger's library. A suite of drawings of ancient coins, that Strada did for Fugger, has found its way into Duke Albrecht's collection and is preserved at Gotha.