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After a time, when Titian was about thirty years old, the two were employed on the "Fondaco dei Tedeschi," or the exchange for German merchants in Venice. Here the frescoes of Titian were more admired than those of Giorgione, and the latter became so jealous that they ceased to live together, as they had done, and there is cause for believing that they were never good friends again.
At first they believed that their eyes deceived them; and that it should have been these two, of all men, who found their master's brother lying in his blood, I must ever deem a miracle. To be sure, any man from the West who was fain to seek another in the land of Egypt, must first make enquiry here at the Fondaco.
We reached it, after passing by that old, old palace, which was appointed in the early ages of Venetian commerce for the reception of oriental traffic and traffickers, and where it is said the Moorish merchants resided till the later time of the Fondaco dei Turchi on the Grand Canal.
Wherefore the said Pisans were put to shame, and the King, both by reason of the florin, and for the words of our wise citizen, made the Florentines free, and appointed for them their own Fondaco, and church, in Tunis, and gave them privileges like the Pisans. And this we know for a truth from the same Peter, having been in company with him at the office of the Priors."
Fortunately, the exact date can be fixed when the frescoes on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi were painted, for we have original records preserved from which we learn the work was begun in 1507 and completed towards the close of 1508. If Titian, then, was "scarcely twenty years old" in 1507-8, he must have been born in 1488-9.
The alteration in date would help to explain the silence of all records about him before 1511, when he would have been only twenty-two and not thirty-five years old; it would fully account for his name not being mentioned by Dürer in his famous letter of 1506, wherein he refers to the painters of Venice, and it would equally account for the absence of his name from the commission to paint the Fondaco frescoes in 1507-8, for he would have been employed simply as Giorgione's young assistant.
A Genoese or Venetian fondaco was usually governed by a consul or bailiff, appointed by the home government, or elected among themselves with the approval of the senate and doge at home. Two or more advisers were usually provided by the home government to act with the consul in negotiations with the local government.
In 1512 he obtained a sinecure in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi and was appointed a State artist, his first task being the completion of certain pictures left unfinished by his predecessor Giovanni Bellini, and in 1516 he was put in possession of a patent granting him a painting monopoly, with a salary of 120 crowns and 80 crowns in addition for the portrait of each successive Doge.
It is true that Giorgione spent time and energy over fresco painting, and from the very publicity of such work as the frescoes on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, he came to be widely known in this direction, but it is infinitely probable that his output in other branches was enormous.
Thus were we fain to tarry, and whereas we had in Augsburg, among other good friends, a faithful ally in trading matters at the Venice Fondaco, Master Sigismund Gossenprot, we lodged in his dwelling, which was one of the finest that fine city; and, as good-hap ruled it, he had, on the very eve of that day, come home from Venice.
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