It was, in fact, not so much the discriminating promotion of art and culture as a princely luxuriousness that absorbed Leo's funds. He was temperate at table. The cardinals and wealthier Romans continued to enjoy the senselessly rich banquets which they seem to have copied from the most decadent pages of Roman history. Cardinal Cornaro is noted as giving a dinner of sixty-five courses on silver dishes. Banker Chigi, a useful friend of Leo, had his valuable plate thrown into the river after one choice banquet; and on the occasion of his marriage with his mistress (whose finger was held by Leo to receive the ring) he brought luxuries, even live fish, from the ends of Europe. Banker Strozzi gave rival banquets, at which cardinals fraternized with courtesans. Leo approved, and sometimes attended, these banquets (at Chigi's palace), but was personally temperate. He had only one meal each day, and fasting fare on three days in each week, but he spent immense sums on musicians and trinket-makers, and many of his pleasures were in the grossest taste of the time. Men of prodigious appetite--one of them a Dominican friar--were brought to his table to amuse him and his guests by their incredible gluttony. The Pope bandied verses with half-drunken poetasters and patronized the coarsest buffoons as well as the keenest wits. When he went to his country house at Magliana for a few weeks' hunting--in which he displayed extraordinary vigour--he took a troop of his poets, buffoons, musicians, and other parasites. At Carnival time he entered into the wild gaiety of Rome; and comedies of the most licentious character were staged before him. Ariosto's _Suppositi_ (in which Cardinal Cibò took a part), Machiavelli's _Mandragola_, and Bibbiena's _Calandria_ alternated with Terence and Plautus. The _Calandria_, written by Cardinal Bibbiena, Leo's chief favourite, the frescoes of whose bathroom seem to have been like those on certain rooms in Pompeii today, is a comedy of thin wit and unrestrained license; the Pope had it presented in the Vatican for the entertainment of Isabella d'Este.