Jacopo Strada (Mantua 1515- Vienna 1588) was born into a patrician family of Mantua. His father was an official in the administration of the Gonzaga dukedom: his son’s intelligence, interest in antiquity, and artistic talents probably recommended him to members of the dynasty, in particular to Isabella d’Este. He received a humanist education in the ambit of the Gonzaga court, as well as –more unusual– an artistic training in workshop of Giulio Romano, Raphael’s pupil who had become the Gonzaga’s principal architect and artist. Giulio imparted his knowledge and experience of the antique to his young pupil, together with the method of studying the antique and adapting its examples to contemporary artistic projects developed in Raphael’s circle.

This included the study of ancient coins, of which Giulio himself owned  a collection considerable both in quantity and quality.  Strada developed foremost into an antiquary, both studying and dealing antique objects, as well as documenting these both for his own use, and on behalf of his patrons or customers. In his youth he travelled widely in Italy and in France to study the antique and probably also  to build up a network of both  intellectual friends and commercial relations. At the latest by 1544 he lived in Nuremberg, where he remained for several years and was amplifying his collections of antiquities as well as contemporary works of art, among which a huge collection of Dürer prints. But he had come to Germany earlier, since he married a German noblewoman, Ottilie Schenk von Rossberg from Würzburg, in that same year.

By that time he was regularly employed by his most important early patron, Hans Jacob Fugger, who possibly had met Strada already in Italy, when he studied Roman law at the University of Bologna. Fugger supported many artists and scholars, and he prized Strada’s antiquarian expertise sufficiently to finance his trips in Germany, Italy and France to collect and study ancient coins, and not just to obtain originals for Fugger’s collection, but also to document those he could not acquire.

The first result of this was Strada’s Epitome Thesauri antiquitatum (Lyon 1553), dedicated to Fugger, containing extensive lives of all Roman Emperors from Julius Caesar up to the reigning Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. This book also included a woodcut likeness of each emperor and of many of their relatives taken from the obverses of ancient Roman imperial coins, as well as a description of both obverse and reverse of the relevant coin.

In addition, from 1550 onward at the latest , Strada  used the numismatic documentation he had collected to prepare a corpus of ancient coins, consisting of two separate but related works: a series of drawings of coins of the Roman emperors, the Magnum ac Novum Opus continens descriptionem Vitae, imaginum, numismatum omnium tam Orientalium quam Occidentalium Imperatorum <…> usque ad Carolum V.  Imperatoremand a systematic collection of structured, succinct descriptions of both Roman imperial and of other ancient coins, the A[ureum) ∙ A[rgenteum] ∙ A[ereum]  numismatωn  antiquorum ΔΙAΣΚΕΥΗ.

The object of our project was to study these two works in conjunction.