In the Middle Ages, Titian painted colors that glow even today as the most perfectly bright pigments. Once, Alphonso d' Este, the Duke of Ferrara, third husband of Lucrezia Borgia, bargaining after the mysterious, Machiavellian manner of those times, for possession of two great cities with many thousand souls in fealty bound, ordered a painting of himself to be made and sent to His Holy and Imperial Majesty Charles V, as a token of goodwill that might facilitate the transfer of property. Titian made the picture about 1525, since when it has remained...
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