‘You are not a rational, natural human being, but aërial, celestial, deified, a devout man and a calm one, esteemed by all, adorned with every treasure and with all the virtues that no one being possesses, from the East to the West. You are the temple of poetry, the theatre of invention, a very sea of comparisons—and you behave in such a manner as to scare even the dead!’
Titian’s other friend, Jacopo Sansovino, the celebrated architect, was also a Tuscan by birth, but was of quite another stamp. His youth had been wild, but he had then married a woman of great beauty and refinement whose name was Paola, and who completely dominated him. The couple were often seen at the house at San Cassian, as Titian and Cecilia his wife often visited them in their dwelling in Saint Mark’s Square close by the clock tower.
Sansovino was handsome still, and rather a fashionable person, but excitable withal and a brilliant talker; his life had been saddened for some length of time by the wild doings of his son, but to his great relief the young man at last took to literature and the art of printing. The Sansovino couple also made their house the general meeting-place of many friends, as Titian did.
Though Jacopo was a Tuscan, Venice made every effort to monopolise his time and industry after he had become famous throughout Italy, and he was appointed the official architect of Saint Mark’s. He was charged with the erection of the Mint and the Library, and of
VENICE FROM THE GARDEN
a new Loggia to replace the very simple one in which the patricians had been accustomed to gather before the meetings of the Great Council, ever since the thirteenth century. How well he succeeded in that, the beautiful construction which fell with the Campanile amply showed.
While he was at work on the Library, Titian was called to Rome to execute an important commission, and set out in the certainty that on his return he should find the building finished and his friend covered with glory. The construction grew indeed, and was soon finished, with its two stories, of Doric and Ionic architecture, and the balustrade that crowns the edifice, and the really royal staircase, and all the rest.
But unhappily, on the night of the eighteenth of December 1545, the vault of the main hall fell in, with no apparent reason. Instantly all Sansovino’s rivals raised a terrific outcry, accusing him of having neglected the most elementary rules of his art, and asserting that the accident was altogether due to his negligence and incapacity. The zealous magistrate whose duty it was to oversee the construction of public buildings did not even wait for a proper warrant, but seized Sansovino instantly and sent him to prison.