ITALIAN GARDENS OF THE RENAISSANCE 
Dives and Lazarus. A long marble colonnade led 
to a paved courtyard surrounded with fountains and 
grottoes enriched with shells and corals, and at the 
end of the garden was a pillared loggia, decorated 
with landscapes by the best Venetian painters and 
commanding a superb view of the lagoon towards 
Chioggia. “Thus,” writes Martinioni, the continu- 
ator of Sansovino, “ you are able at the same moment 
to enjoy the splendour of the sea and the beauties 
of mountains, woods, and flowers, in short of all that 
pleases both the eye and the heart of man.” 1 
On the opposite side of Venice, at Birigrande, in the 
north-east quarter behind the great Dominican church 
of S. Giovanni and Paolo, was the house where Titian 
lived so long. There the great master received his 
illustrious patrons, the Dukes of Mantua and Ferrara, 
Cardinal de Granvelle, the Spanish prelate Pacheco, and 
Henry III, the last of the Valois kings. There 
Isabella d’Este came, still full of vitality in spite of 
her declining years, to examine the painter’s latest 
works and endeavour to secure a Magdalen or a 
S. Jerome for her studio. In the summer of 1534, 
her son-in-law and daughter, the Duke and Duchess 
of Urbino, often rowed across from their house at 
Murano to visit the artist and give him sittings for 
their portraits. Here, more than thirty years after- 
1 F. Sansovino, Venetia, 370. 
I 10 
