Jacopo Strada\'s Magnum ac Novum Opus: A Sixteenth-Century Numismatic Corpus

Volker Heenes

Jacopo Strada's Magnum Opus ac Novum Opus: a Sixteenth-century Numismatic Corpus
In the first part of my paper I will give you a brief survey of the history and the importance of the numismatic corpus we are engaged in investigating, as well as an outline of our project. The second part of my paper will be dedicated to an in-depth discussion of the tasks and issues we intend to deal with in the course of our project.

Jacopo Strada's Magnum ac Novum Opus continens descriptionem vitae, imaginum, numismatum omnium tam Orientalium quam Occidentalium Imperatorum ac Tyrannorum, cum collegis ac coniugibus liberisque suis, usque ad Carolum V. Imperatorem (Fig. 1) is the most comprehensive corpus of ancient coins and medals composed during the sixteenth century. Therefore, it constitutes one of the central works in the history of numismatics as a scholarly discipline. The 36-volume work is an illustrated numismatic corpus beginning with the coins of the Roman Republic and then dealing with the coinage of the Roman Empire from the days of Julius Caesar to those of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. At the same time, it also represents a corpus of very high quality drawings.
Our project will be dealing specifically with the four volumes discussing the coins of the Roman Republic, today in the British Library in London (Arundel Mss. 65, 1-4); and with the 29 volumes now in the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, which contain illustrations of the imperial coins (Mss. A 2175, 1-14; 16-30). Volume 15 with the coins of the reign of Emperor Hadrian is lost today. There are two further volumes available in the Austrian National Library (Sig. cod. 9419; cod. 9420), whose illustrations are so closely related to the drawings in the Magnum Opus, that it is very likely that they were originally destined for this work.

Work on the Magnum Opus started around 1550 and it was originally commissioned by Hans Jacob Fugger. The corpus includes more than 9,000 large and very detailed illustrations of coins and medals executed in pen and ink on folio. Together with the rest of Fugger's library and collection, the volumes became the property of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria in 1566. The duke ordered the work to be continued, and in 1571 he had the single sheets bound in the splendid bindings he commissioned especially for the corpus. (Fig. 2). The inventory of the Munich Kunstkammer reserved its first three entries for this corpus, which was subsequently looted by the Swedish Army during the Thirty Years War. Four volumes were later purchased by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and may now be consulted at the British Library. Duke Ernest the Pious of Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg acquired the 30 volumes with the drawings of the imperial coins in 1648, and these are now preserved in the Gotha Forschungsbibliothek, where they count as a major bibliophile treasure. Nonetheless, they have remained largely neglected. The most important reason for this fact is probably that Strada's complementary descriptions of the coins, a separate work entitled A A A NumismatΩn Antiquorum ΔΙΑΣΚΕΥΕ, (Fig. 3), were never united with the volumes of drawings. Two manuscripts exemplars, however, consisting of eleven volumes each, have been preserved in the library of Vienna University and in the Czech National Library in Prague.

It is the intention of this project to bring together for the first time – virtually – these dispersed volumes of drawings, and then, in a second step, to investigate the illustrations of the coins in conjunction with their descriptions. A third and final phase will be the analysis of the entire work, in particular in its historical and artistic context. In this way, we hope to be able to determine its importance for the history of numismatics more precisely. The digitisation of drawings and descriptions is a vital prerequisite for this, as is their structured input in a suitable database. Obviously, the most suitable facility for this is the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, founded in 1946 by Fritz Saxl, Richard Krautheimer and Karl Lehmann at the Warburg Institute in London; it is now located at Berlin, as a project of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. We are very happy that they have agreed to become our partner in this project.

Fame and Impact of the Magnum Opus during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
It is rather likely that the Swedish Army specifically targeted the volumes of the Magnum Opus during the looting of the Munich Kunstkammer in 1632. Strada's corpus of coins and medals was by then quite famous, and was highly appreciated by, among others, the well-known numismatist Charles Patin. Its fame would last until the development of scientific numismatics by Joseph Eckhel at the end of the eighteenth century, which caused Strada's volumes to fall into oblivion. They no longer corresponded to generally accepted scientific demands: for example:
the drawings did not constitute an exact representation of the originals, since in the images they had been enlarged (Fig. 4) to a diameter of 20 to 25 cm, and, moreover, Strada had imaginatively restored damaged coins;
sometimes obverses and reveres were freely combined;
moreover, the order in which Strada presented the coins did not correspond to the geographical system introduced by Eckel.
Strada's numismatic studies have been preserved almost exclusively in this corpus. Extracts may be found in the Series Imperatorum Romanorum ac Graecorum et Germanorum, a series of luxury volumes, which Strada produced for Habsburg emperors Ferdinand I and Maximilian II (Fig. 5). His materials and records, however, which formed the foundation of his Magnum Opus, are lost, that is, both his personal coin collection as well as the entire body of sketches and preliminary drawings he must have owned. Only his own, standardised descriptions of the coins he had studied, still exist in the manuscript of the ΔΙΑΣΚΕΥΕ . These descriptions represent Strada's interpretation of the originals he had viewed, and thus provide insights as to his aims and methodology, and provide information about his antiquarian preconceptions and their origins, as well as his models. Offering an early example for the systematic and standardised documentation of coins, both Strada's drawings and his descriptions can be considered as an important source for the early history of numismatics.

Strada's Numismatic Studies
In his only self-authored published work, the Epitome thesauri antiquitatum, (Figs. 6+7) published in Lyon in 1553, the coins mainly serve as illustrations: it . is a typical "Bildnisvitenbuch", containing short lives of the Emperors, starting with Julius Caesar and ending with Charles V, as well as of their wives and relatives. It is illustrated with small woodcuts that portray ancient coins. Each person is represented by one image, conceived as a portrait of the historical person, rather than an exact image of a coin or medal. The book itself was not in any way a revolutionary or a particularly erudite work, but was written for a non-professional audience. The only truly numismatic element of the text consists of the series of short descriptions of the coin reverses, which remained un-illustrated, but were explained by means of historical and epigraphical sources. These short treatises provide information about Roman society, its architecture, religion and ceremonies. Strada oriented himself on Varro's concept of a division of antiquitates into sacrae, publicae, privatae and militares. He was obviously able to use coins as historical sources, as he showed in his reconstructions of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and of a temple of Janus Quadrifrons, based on ancient coins, which he made available to the Lyon antiquary Guillaume du Choul, who used them in his Discours de la réligion des anciens Romains (Fig. 8).

Strada's Sources
Fortunately, the sources of Strada's coin-drawings can be reconstructed, given the fact that in his coin-descriptions in the Diaskeuè, he always mentioned the collection in which he had seen the best examplar of this particular coin-type. The list of collections visited by him approximately corresponds to his sojourns, as far as they are known from other sources (Fig. 9): born in Mantua around 1515, in his youth he travelled widely in Italy and perhaps beyond, and then around 1540 moved to Germany, where he lived and worked in Nuremberg. In the early 1550s he again spent some years in travel, living in Lyon, Rome and Venice. Even after 1558, when he settled in Vienna as architect and antiquary to Emperor Ferdinand I, his business affairs often took him to Germany and Italy. On the basis of the provenances Strada gives for the coins he illustrates, it is possible not only to reconstruct in part his own, personal coin collection, but also to find out more about some of the most important collections of the mid-sixteenth century, for example those of his teacher Giulio Romano, of Antonio Agustín, Archbishop of Tarragona, and of the antiquarian Enea Vico.

Strada's Network: the Accademia della Virtù
In addition, the list of collections as it appears in the Diaskeuè presents an important source regarding his numerous contacts with antiquarians and scholars all over Europe. In 1553, Strada travelled from Lyon, where he met Guillaume Du Choul and Sebastiano Serlio, to Rome. In the eternal city, he acquired antiquities during the following two years on behalf of his patron Johann Jakob Fugger, and amassed an extensive collection of drawings of antiquarian and artistic content. This collection, which may be considered a predecessor of Cassiano dal Pozzo's Museo cartaceo, formed the basis of a very ambitious programme of publications, which however failed. Strada's commission of the numismatic drawings for the Magnum Opus was an integral part of this programme of collecting of documentation, as it is clear from a description of Strada's activities in the Trattato della pittura of the artist Giovanni Battista Armenini, who had been part of the team.

The Development of Numismatic Research
Research conducted during the past two decades has concentrated with growing intensity on antiquarianism in general, and on the development of numismatics in the early modern period. It has been possible to show that, even though antiquarian studies remained almost exclusively philological in character until quite late in the sixteenth century. This began to change around the 1550s. From then on many antiquarian studies concentrated on iconographical themes, a development which was due to the flourishing of numismatic research around this time. In this context the works of Enea Vico, Hubertus Goltzius, Sebastiano Erizzo and Pirro Ligorio need to be mentioned. The numismatic publications of the time were engaged, on the one hand with the identification, classification and chronological ordering of the coins, and on the other hand attempted to analyse the religious, historical, topographical and military information to be obtained from them. The rediscovery of the iconographical language of the ancient world happened primarily through the study of coins and medals, whose "beschriftete Reliefs" or "labelled reliefs" provided the necessary written and pictorial information that helped to identify single figures and attributes figuring on the monuments, to attach the appropriate terminology to these, and to interpret them correctly. As a result, ancient coins began to be recognised as a distinct source on a par with the literary tradition.

Strada's Impact on the Collecting Concept of Hans Jakob Fugger and of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria
The Magnum Opus is important in several ways: apart from the indications relating to collections and collectors of coins and medals, it was the most important and costly commission ever given by Fugger as regards his own massive collection. The collection maintained this exalted status even after its move to Munich and it remained the most important component of the institutional complex of collections developing under Fugger's supervision for Albrecht V in Munich – Kunstkammer, Library and Antiquarium.

The Objectives of the Project
The main reason why investigation and analysis of the Magnum Opus has so far been neglected, is the fact that the various manuscripts have not been preserved together, but are distributed across Europe in Gotha, Vienna, Prague and London.
The first of the five main objectives of the project is, therefore, to make this material available to other scholars and to analyse it. For this reason, a complete register of Strada's numismatic manuscripts as well as of his additional antiquarian writings and publications will be compiled. The drawings from the Magnum opus preserved in Gotha will be fed into the database of the Census. Because of the volume of the Magnum opus, during the first phase of the project, only the first 14 volumes (corresponding to the first twelve emperors) will be processed. It is intend to process the remaining volumes in Gotha and in London, during a second phase of the project.

Strada's Numismatic Method, as far as it can be Extrapolated from the Available Material
The registration of Strada's material, its digitisation and the identification of the authentic sources form the prerequisite for the second goal of the project: the analysis of Strada's drawings of coins and medals from the point of view of their technique and style, in order to be able to follow the modes of translation of the models studied into standardised drawings. In this case, the relationship between Strada's drawings and descriptions with the original coins will also be considered. Finally, every attempt will be made to reconstruct the intended original order of the drawings as Strada intended it, by a comparison with the organisation of the coins-descriptions in the Diaskeuè and an analysis of the archival material. Thus we hope to obtain some insight into Strada's antiquarian methodology.

The Creation of the Magnum Opus ac Novum Opus and the Influence of Strada's Patrons
The project's third aim consists of the description of the creation of the Magnum Opus and to examine the influence of his patrons, in particular that of Johann Jakob Fugger. For this reason, the available archival material on the corpus of coins and medals will be gathered together and analyzed, and the provenance of Strada's models will be studied. Fugger's activities, in particular his support of the arts and sciences, his antiquarian interests and his rich Europe-wide connections in this field will be taken into account.

The Connections between Antiquarian and Numismatic Research among Strada's Predecessors and Contemporaries
As the fourth goal, the connections between Strada and the contemporary circles of antiquarians in Italy, France and Germany will be explored. The particular focus rests on his ties with Antonio Agustín and with the Accademia della Virtù, both of whom played a leading role in the antiquarian research of the time. In his youth, Johann Jakob Fugger had studied in Bologna together with Antonio Agustín, Alessandro Farnese and with Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle under the supervision of the most famous expert of Roman Law: Andrea Alciato. Alciato was very familiar with the ideas and intellectual trends then current in Rome. Therefore, the Roman circles linked to the Vitruvian Academy may well have influenced Fugger's commission of the Magnum Opus.

The Art Historical Issues
The fifth goal is the processing of the art historical characteristics of Strada's drawings. In contrast to those of other antiquarians of his time, they show the coins' averse and reverse in a standardised format, and in a very large diameter of 20 to 25 cm. This format implies that the drawings show an amount of detail which would not have been visible on the models, that is on the coins themselves. It also suggests that the architectural representations on many coin-reverses as drawn by Strada (Fig. 10), should be interpreted as reconstructions of the monuments depicted, rather than as exact renditions of the images on the coins. An analysis of these drawings will throw light on the use he made of such models in his own architectural projects (for example the Antiquarium in Munich and the Neugebäude in Vienna).


Structure and Dissemination of the Results
The presentation of the research results will take place in the Census database as well as in the form of a monograph.
To round off my paper, I want to show you a couple of screenshots, in order to exemplify how the data of our project will be presented in the Census-database.
In the Census database, the digitised drawings and descriptions of the coins are connected to metadata, descriptions and transcriptions and provided with links to the appropriate original coins and thus made available to the public. As a result, it will become possible to compare directly the drawings, descriptions, originals and illustrations from the diverse contemporary works and to analyse them directly side by side (Figs. 11-21).

Many thanks for your interest!


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