L'Aretino e l'ambasciatore di Carlo V

Ingres first painted this scene in 1815 and came back to it in 1848, an old man reworking an old idea. The setting is 16th-century Venice, and the seated figure is Pietro Aretino, the satirist so feared for his poison pen that he was known as the scourge of princes. The standing man is an envoy of the emperor Charles V, come to buy Aretino's flattery, or at least his silence. Ingres worked in the polished, jewel-toned troubadour manner then in vogue, which staged the Renaissance as intimate costume drama. On the wall at the left he hung a self-portrait by Titian, Aretino's real-life friend, tucking one painter's tribute inside another's picture.