Pietro Aretino, that depraved adventurer and most successful blackmailer in literature, was one of Titian’s intimates and partisans. He wished, nevertheless, to have his portrait painted by Tintoret, who was in no wise afraid of the scoundrel’s enmity, although most of the prominent personages of the time quailed before it. Aretino being posed, Tintoret furiously drew a hanger from under his coat. Aretino was terrified lest he should be punished for his malicious tongue, and cried out, “Jacopo, what are you about?” “I am only going to take your measure,” said Tintoret complacently; and, measuring him from head to foot, he added, “your height is just two and a half hangers.” Aretino’s impudence returned. “You’re a great madman,” he said, “and always up to your pranks.” But this grim hint sufficed; the rascal never after dared to slander Tintoret, but, on the contrary, tried to ingratiate himself into his friendship. [11] Two instances are worthy of record. Having agreed to paint a large historical picture for the Doges’ Palace, he said to the procurators, “If any other shall, within the space of two years, paint a better picture of this subject, you shall take his and reject Footnote: mine.” At first his enemies spoke so censuringly of his “St. Mark Freeing the Fugitive Slave” that the brethren hesitated whether to accept it; whereupon Tintoret had it brought back to his studio. Afterwards the brethren repented, begged for its return, and ordered three other pictures. In his home Tintoret enjoyed tranquillity. His wife, Faustina de’ Vescovi, was thrifty and dignified, and perhaps she was not a little annoyed by the “unpracticalness” of her husband. According to tradition, when he went out she tied up money for him in his handkerchief, and bade him give an exact account of it on his return. Having spent his afternoon and money with congenial spirits at some rendezvous whose name, unlike that of the Mermaid, where Elizabethan wits caroused, has been lost, he playfully assured Madonna Faustina that her allowance had gone to help the poor. She was particular that he should wear the dress of a Venetian citizen; but if he happened to go abroad in rainy weather, she called out to him from an upper window to come back and put on his old clothes. We have glimpses of him passing to and fro in Venice with Marietta, his favorite daughter, a painter of merit, whose early death saddened his later years.[12] Of his other children, two daughters entered a nunnery; a third married Casser, a German; his eldest son, Domenico, adopted his father’s profession, and assisted him in his work; another son went to the bad, and was cut off from an inheritance by his father’s will. In spite of his habit of giving away pictures, or of charging a small price for them, Tintoret bequeathed a comfortable fortune to his heirs. [12] Marietta was born in 1560, and died in 1590.