delights of sense were to form the most agreeable relief to days of
continuous and magnificently fruitful labour. It is just because
Titian's art of this great period of some twenty years so entirely
accords with what we know, and may legitimately infer, to have been his
life at this time, that it becomes important to consider the friendship
with Aretino and the rise of the so-called Triumvirate, which was a kind
of Council of Three, having as its _raison d'être_ the mutual
furtherance of material interests, and the pursuit of art, love, and
pleasure. The third member of the Triumvirate was Jacopo Tatti or del
Sansovino, the Florentine sculptor, whose fame and fortune were so far
above his deserts as an artist. Coming to Venice after the sack of Rome,
which so entirely for the moment disorganised art and artists in the
pontifical city, he elected to remain there notwithstanding the pressing
invitations sent to him by Francis the First to take service with him.
In 1529 he was appointed architect of San Marco, and he then by his
adhesion completed the Triumvirate which was to endure for more than a
quarter of a century.

It has always excited a certain sense of distrust in Titian, and caused
the world to form a lower estimate of his character than it would
otherwise have done, that he should have been capable of thus living in
the closest and most fraternal intimacy with a man so spotted and in
many ways so infamous as Aretino. Without precisely calling Titian to
account in set terms, his biographers Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and above
all M. Georges Lafenestre in _La Vie et L'Oeuvre du Titien_, have
relentlessly raked up Aretino's past before he came together with the
Cadorine, and as pitilessly laid bare that organised system of
professional sycophancy, adulation, scurrilous libel, and blackmail,
which was the foundation and the backbone of his life of outward pomp
and luxurious ease at Venice. By them, as by his other biographers, he