Dissent - doubts, disagreements, open questions

Two points remain in dispute between the researchers beyond the duration of the project: 

The Magnum ac Novum Opus - complete or incomplete?

According to Dirk Jacob Jansen, the Magnum Opus was far from finished at the time of Fugger’s financial troubles: after having been ceded to Duke Albrecht V. of Bavaria in 1566-67, hardly any further work appears to have been done, and in 1571 the files of drawings were bound as they were in the Duke’s costly bindings. Volker Heenes, on the other hand, argues that the work on the Magnum ac Novum Opus continued under Albrecht V and was completed, even if the obverse and reverse drawings were not complete. Many obverses show only the legend of the coin and no longer the emperor's portrait. This applies to all MaNO volumes from volume 14 to 27, where only one obverse drawing of a portrait type is shown. This was probably done for cost reasons, as a coin drawing with a portrait was more expensive than a drawing with only the coin legend (p. 152). The MaNO contains no medieval or early modern coins. The Diaskeué contains a total of 14 coin descriptions of seven emperors from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, i.e. the MaNO can be regarded as complete. Even for the first fourteen volumes of the MaNo, at most half of them are described in the Diaskeué.

The Diaskeué - who commissioned it?

It is unclear whether Fugger actually owned a copy of Strada’s descriptions, collected in a separate work. Who commissioned the Diaskeué, or even if there was one, must, according to Volker Heenes, remain an open question, while Dirk Jacob Jansen, on the other hand, considers Fugger's commissioning of the Diaskeué highly likely, because Fugger funded Strada’s travels dedicated in part at least to his numismatic research, enabling him to collect the documentation necessary both to execute the drawings, and to edit the descriptions of all the coins he studied. 

For Dirk Jacob Jansen, it is inconceivable that the learned Fugger would not have wanted his numismatic drawings provided with the scholarly commentary he had commissioned, though it is unclear what form that would have taken. 

For Volker Heenes, Fugger's letter to Duke Albrecht V of 19 February 1569, in which he advises the Duke to buy only the eight volumes of coin descriptions from Strada, but not the three volumes of indices, argues against him as the commissioner. The indices in particular are a very useful tool for cataloguing the eight very large volumes of coin descriptions. It is possible that Fugger did not even know the Diaskeué from his own experience. The letter is also an important piece of evidence that the volumes were not in Fugger's library, otherwise they would have automatically come into the possession of Duke Albrecht V, who acquired them along with the other volumes from Fugger's extensive library in 1569 (pp. 159-160). It is also interesting to note what Fugger does not write: Namely, that the Diaskeué would be the complementary coin descriptions to the coin designs in the MaNO. This would have been the best argument for acquiring the coin descriptions. However, the only complete copy of the of the Diaskeué was in the possession of Wilhelm von Rosenberg (now in the Czech National Library in Prague). Whether he acquired the copy, received it as a gift or even commissioned it remains an open question (pp. 159-160). For Heenes, it is most likely that Strada made the Diaskeué on his own initiative after he had learning how to make a list of epigraphic inscriptions in Rome (pp. 143-144) and applied its system to coins.