From about 1550 onward the Mantuan antiquary and architect Jacopo Strada (1515-1588) created a
thirty-volume corpus for the Augsburg banker and politician Hans Jakob Fugger (1516-1575)
depicting coins of the Roman Empire from Gaius Julius Caesar to Charles V: the Magnum ac Novum
Opus. Now preserved in the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha it contains almost nine thousand
drawings of Roman Imperial coins. Strada also created an eleven-volume coin catalogue A. A. A.
NumismatOn Antiquorum ¿¿¿S¿¿¿¿ manuscripts of which are preserved in Vienna and in Prague
which contains coin descriptions that Strada claimed complemented the Magnum ac Novum Opus.
In a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG images and texts have been
combined for the first time. For this purpose Strada's drawings and descriptions of coins of
the Roman emperors from Caesar to Trajan have been entered into the databases of the Census of
Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
and of Translatio Nummorum (Kunsthistorisches Institut Florence). In addition the two works
have been studied in their mutual relationship and have been placed in their
antiquarian-numismatic and art historical context. The first results of this combination of
diverse scholarly approaches are published in the present volume. They reveal numerous new
aspects and perspectives of antiquarian scholarship during the second half of the sixteenth
century and thus represent an important contribution to the history of antiquarian studies in
particular of early numismatics.
