Strada’s Role in Projects Initiated by Emperor Ferdinand i

In the foregoing I have attempted to sketch the situation in the field of architecture and decoration at the Imperial court at the time Strada arrived in Vienna, somewhere in May 1558. He found that his new Habsburg patrons had developed a taste for more up-to-date architecture and decoration in the classical, Italian manner; a taste that was, however, difficult for them to satisfy. As we have seen, some of their architects and court-artists had some inkling of what was going on in this field both south of the Alps and elsewhere in Europe, at least by means of some of the recent illustrated publications on architecture and ornamental design. The most important among these were the first five books of Serlio’s architectural treatise. The first volume of these had come out in 1537, and all five books were repeatedly reprinted in the fifth decade of the sixteenth century also in French and Flemish editions.1 But few, if any, of the architects at court had any first-hand experience of such developments, and some of them, such as the illiterate Benedikt Kölbl, would hardly have been able to profit even from the printed material. In view of this lack of masters sufficiently acquainted with, let alone wellversed in the new manner, the arrival of an artist and designer who was both thoroughly acquainted with its theoretical aspects and had first-hand knowledge of its results, must have been quite welcome. As we have seen in Chapter 4, very soon after his arrival in Vienna Strada was repeatedly asked to advise, with other court-architects, on several of the projects being executed or planned at that time. When in January 1560 Strada was formally appointed as an architect, the salary he was conceded was similar to that of the other architects active at court. As Hilda Lietzmann has first pointed out, this makes it very unlikely that his tasks remained limited to such occasional advice. In the following a number of projects at court will be discussed in which Strada was involved.