Nicolò Stoppio

Who is Nicolò Stoppio?

Nic[c]olò Stoppio was an art dealer, who worked for Albert V, Duke of Bavaria in the highly competitive search for Italian works of art and Roman antiquities to add to the ducal collection. The activities of Niccolo Stoppio, his rival Jacopo Strada, and Philipp Hainhofer were characteristic of a new type of intermediary dealer in the most innovative art markets that surfaced in the second half of the 16th century: courtiers who supplied their patrons with news and art gossip, paintings and curiosities, antiquities and the latest books. Stoppio's correspondence with the immensely rich connoisseur of art, also advisor to Albrecht and the source of some of his earliest purchases of antiquities, Hans Jakob Fugger, survives. His rival was Jacopo Strada, whose competence in matters of art connoisseurship he lost no opportunity to belittle. In furnishing Albert's Antiquarium in the Munich Residenz, Stoppio was largely responsible for purchases on the Venetian market of copies of Roman sculptures and of modern works, whereas Strada was the agent through whom Venetian collections of Roman sculptures passed to Albert. Stoppio also passed on nuggets of high gossip: