EUGANEAN HILLS FROM THE LAGOON, LOW TIDE
still keeps his love of conversation, his luxurious tastes, his lordly manner; and now he feels himself the equal of the great of the earth, and it amuses him to exchange letters with princes. For secretaries he has poets, historians, and even a cardinal; he is the Titian who will allow an emperor to stoop for the brush that has fallen from his hand. But few men ever had such grace and winning charm, and his house is ever open to his countless friends, a place of gathering, of wit and of good talk, where ladies are received, some of whom a later age will call blue-stockings, ladies who are members of learned academies, and ladies that play the lute.
Such was Titian, and such the house in which he was rarely alone. He had among many friends two at least with whom he was really intimate, the sculptor Sansovino, and Pietro Aretino the man of letters. The former was the friend of his heart and of his artistic intelligence; the latter he himself regarded as a sort of wild beast whom he had tamed and whom he kept to frighten his rivals and his enemies. He could not let a day go by without seeing both, and the three were generally together. If one of them was asked to dinner, he invariably begged his host to invite the other two.
They certainly did not resemble one another. Aretino was an adventurer who had tried most things: in his boyhood he had forged and stolen; in his young prime he had been a renegade monk, and then a courtier; in his maturity, to use one of his own expressions, he earned his living by the sweat of his ink. The Grand Duke of Tuscany had hired a house for
Tassini, under Carbon.
him at the Riva del Carbon, for sixty soldi yearly, on the Grand Canal, and it was there that he followed an occupation which procured him all the necessaries and some of the luxuries of life. He made it his business to address the most abjectly flattering panegyrics to eminent persons, and even to sovereigns like Francis I. and the Emperor Charles V., and they rewarded him with presents of money or old wine. Or if some unlucky aspirant to office was in need of popularity or favour, Aretino quietly explained to him that a little article from his own pen could make or mar success; and there was nothing to be done but to pay, and to pay handsomely. Between the composition of one libel and the next, the amiable Tuscan lived riotously on his latest earnings with his two daughters Adria and Austria; in plain language he was a blackmailer, a voluptuary, a man of the highest taste, and of the lowest tastes.
No one loved him, but he was generally feared, and was therefore much sought after. His house was
Mutinelli, Annali.
always full, and it was said that it was impossible to go there without meeting a scholar, a soldier, and a monk. He himself said pleasantly that the steps of his house were as much worn by the feet of visitors as the pavement before the Capitol was by the cars of triumphing Roman generals. Nor was it only those that could pay blackmail who mounted the stairs. The man was full of contradictions; the poor crept up to his door and did not return empty-handed. Aretino was charitable.