Jacopo Strada (Mantua, 1507 – Prague 1588) was an Italian polymath courtier, painter, architect, goldsmith, inventor of machines, numismatist, linguist, collector, and merchant of works of art. His portrait by Titian has kept his image familiar. Biography He is supposed to have received early training as a goldsmith in the Mantua workshops of Giulio Romano; drawings of Giulio's Palazzo del Tè and of its painted interiors and those of the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua, datable 1567-68, are attributed to Jacopo Strada, intended for his Descrizione di tutta Italia. From 1552 to 1555 he sojourned in Lyon and travelled to Rome in the service of Pope Paul III, and after his death his successor Marcellus II, upon whose sudden death he returned north. From 1556 onwards he settled at Vienna and from 1576 served as an official artist and architect to three successive Habsburg Holy Roman emperors, Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolph II. He also worked for Albert V, Duke of Bavaria, for whom he conceived the Antiquarium to house the antiquities at the Munich Residenz; the Roman sculptures that he assembled for the Duke may still be seen in the setting he devised there. He also served as the friend and trusted agent of the Augsburg patrician, humanist and book-collector, and a friend and advisor of Albrecht, the immensely rich Jakob Fugger (1516–1557), for whom he scouted works of art in Italy from his headquarters in Mantua. On Fugger's commission he assembled a comprehensive array of coats of arms of Italian nobility, filling fifteen volumes, for Fugger's library. A suite of drawings of ancient coins, that Strada did for Fugger, has found its way into Duke Albrecht's collection and is preserved at Gotha. In 1544 he wed Grafin Ottilia Schenk von Roßberg in Lyon. He moved to Nuremberg in 1546, where he was granted the city's freedom as a goldsmith in 1549. In 1556 he moved to Vienna, taking a house that still stands, now Bankgasse 12, and putting his antiquarian knowledge at the disposal of the Habsburg court, and rewarded with the care of the imperial treasury. He worked as architect to Ferdinand I in the ongoing construction of the Hofburg. In December 1566 he journeyed to Albrecht's court in Munich, to oversee the Antiquarium planned in conjunction and competition with Fugger, returning to Vienna in 1568. For Schloss Bučovice near Brünn he provided plans for the architect