Stradas Magnum ac Novum Opus

When the Swedes plun­dered the Kunst­kammer of the Duke of Bavaria in Munich during the Thirty Years’ War, its most famous object was the corpus of numis­matic drawings by Jacopo Strada, 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. The thirty volumes, contai­ning mainly coins from the impe­rial period, even­tually entered the library of Duke Ernest the Pious of Saxe-Gotha-Alten­burg, today the Gotha Rese­arch Library (Chart. A 2175, 1–14, 16–30). Strada probably received one ducat for each of the appro­xi­m­ately 8,500 drawings, executed in pen and ink on folio sheets. They had been commis­sioned from him by his first patron, Hans Jakob Fugger. Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria later acquired the loose sheets, toge­ther with Fugger’s library and coll­ec­tion. He had them sple­ndidly bound in red leather and had the bindings deco­rated with his portrait and coat of arms. 

Although this corpus of coins was highly esteemed at the time, it remained largely unex­plored until the begin­ning of this project. The reasons for this lie in the rise of scho­larly numis­matic rese­arch at the end of the eigh­te­enth century. Since the corpus no longer met its stan­dards, it lost much of its renown. 

Duke Albrecht had not acquired Strada’s descrip­tions of the coins, which, accor­ding to Strada himself, were intended to comple­ment the coin drawings. They consti­tute a sepa­rate work, preserved in two copies in Vienna and Prague, under the title A<ureorum> A<rgenteorum> A<ereorum> Numis­matΩn Anti­quorum ΔΙΑΣΚΕΥΕ. For this reason, his descrip­tions were never compared with the volumes of drawings. These eleven volumes contain struc­tured and metho­dical descrip­tions, anno­ta­tions, and proven­ance infor­ma­tion indi­ca­ting where Strada claimed to have seen the coins. This made it possible to under­take a detailed exami­na­tion of Strada’s inter­pre­ta­tions of the coins, which in turn opened up the possi­bi­lity of studying in detail the approach taken by anti­qua­rians of the period. 

The most important prere­qui­site for these compa­ra­tive studies was the digi­tiza­tion of the drawings and texts, which made it possible to compare them. When an ancient original could be iden­ti­fied as a model, the coins and descrip­tions were entered into the Census data­base. In addi­tion, the coin descrip­tions were also incor­po­rated into the „Trans­latio Nummorum“ data­base (KHI Florence), in order to make acces­sible both the text and those coin drawings not linked to an ancient original. 

As a result of the project, a digital edition was produced of the drawings from Strada’s Magnum ac novum opus and of the corre­spon­ding descrip­tions from the A<ureorum> A<rgenteorum> A<ereorum> Numis­matΩn Anti­quorum ΔΙΑΣΚΕΥΕ, which is publicly acces­sible through the data­bases of the Census and the KHI in Florence.

In 2022, Michael Imhof Verlag published a mono­graph by Volker Heenes and Dirk Jacob Jansen entitled Magnum ac novum opus. A Sixte­enth Century Corpus of Ancient Numis­ma­tics. It pres­ents and comm­ents on selected drawings by Strada toge­ther with the coin descrip­tions. The publi­ca­tion also includes an assess­ment of the condi­tion of the mate­rial, infor­ma­tion on its proven­ance, and a recon­s­truc­tion of the sequence of the coin drawings as Strada had origi­nally planned it. In addi­tion, it situates the Magnum ac novum opus iwithin the history of numis­matic scho­lar­ship and in the context of sixte­enth-century anti­qua­rian studies. The appendix also contains a selec­tion of tran­scrip­tions and trans­la­tions of the most important passages.