214

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To form a more complete idea of Strada's numismatic activity we have to take into account the fact that the Epitome, as its name implies, is merely an abstract of a much more voluminous description of all the coins he had been able to study, and of which, it appears, he had obtained drawings, casts or rubbings, or whatever method of reproduction was used; he evidently intended his Magnum ac nouum opus, as he entitled it, to be fully illustrated. In other words, his ambition was to constitute and print as complete as possible an illustrated numismatic corpus of Roman republican and imperial coinage. Though he never succeeded in realizing this vast ambition, he did find a willing patron in Hans Jakob Fugger, who was prepared to fund his researches and to pay the quite extraordinary sum of a ducat for each of the drawings, made on sheets of beautiful paper of the 'folio reale' format, onto which Strada hd copied from his own files the obverses and the reverses of the coins he had studied.