"[160]
Exactly! The occasion could well be improved by a little timely
exaggeration well calculated to appeal to the sympathies and "infinite
benignity" of the monarch, and if, when the writer had actually reached
the respectable age of eighty-two, he wrote himself down as ninety-five,
who would gainsay him? It added point to his appeal--that was the chief
thing--and as to accuracy, well, Titian was not the man to be
over-scrupulous when his own interests were involved. But even though
the statement were not deliberately made to heighten the effect of an
appeal, we must in any case make allowances for the natural proneness to
exaggerate their age which usually characterises men of advanced years,
so that any _ex parte_ statement of this kind must be received with due
caution. Where, moreover, as in the present case, we have evidence of a
directly contradictory kind furnished by independent witnesses, whose
declarations in this respect are presumably disinterested, such _ex
parte_ statements are on the face of them unreliable. The balance of
evidence in this case appears to rest on the side of the older
historians, Dolce and Vasari, whose statements, as I hold, are in the
circumstances more reliable than the picturesque exaggeration of a man
of advanced years.
I claim, therefore, that any account of Titian's life based solely on
such flimsy evidence as to his age as is found in this letter to Philip
the Second is, to say the least, open to grave doubt.
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