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Updated: June 17, 2025
The next day I dined with Mengs, and the day after that I was accosted in the street by an ill-looking fellow, who bade me follow him to a cloister, as he had something of importance to communicate to me. As soon as he saw that we were unobserved, he told me that the Alcalde Messa was going to pay me a visit that same night with a band of police, "of whom," he added, "I am one.
On the fifth day the wound was almost healed, but the exhaustion had left me so weak that I could not leave my bed. Such was my situation when I received a letter from Mengs.
I was sitting at table with Mengs when a chamberlain of the Holy Father called. When he came in he asked M. Mengs if I lived there, and on that gentleman pointing me out, he gave me, from his holy master, the Cross of the Order of the Golden Spur with the diploma, and a patent under the pontifical seal, which, in my quality as doctor of laws, made me a prothonotary-apostolic 'extra urbem'.
Indeed, he had said in a moment of exaltation that I should have compelled the Alcade Messa to escort me not to my own house but to his, as it was in his house that I had been arrested. Mengs was an exceedingly ambitious and a very jealous man; he hated all his brother painters.
My carriage was at the door, and I was just taking leave of Mengs when an officer appeared on the scene, and asked the painter if the Chevalier de Casanova was in his house. "I am the Chevalier de Casanova," said I. "Then I hope you will follow me of your own free will to the prison of Buen Retiro.
Another time I suppressed a heavy and stupid criticism of his on someone who had maintained that there were no monuments still existing of the antediluvian period. Mengs thought he would confound the author by citing the remains of the Tower of Babel a double piece of folly, for in the first place there are no such remains, and in the second, the Tower of Babel was a post-diluvian building.
I went home, bathed, slept an hour, rose, dressed, and dined pleasantly with the family. In the evening I took the Mengs family for a drive in my landau, and we then went to the theatre, where the castrato who played the prima donna was a great attraction. He was the favourite pathic of Cardinal Borghese, and supped every evening with his eminence.
A person of rank who dabbled in painting for his amusement, having one day shown Poussin one of his performances, and asked his opinion of its merits, the latter replied, "You only want a little poverty, sir, to make a good painter." The admirers of Mengs, jealous of Poussin's title of "the Painter of Philosophers," conferred on him the antithetical one of "the Philosopher of Painters."
Of the composition, the painter Mengs observed, "it seemed as if the hand had no part in it, and it had been the work of pure thought." Velasquez, who must have seen many a bull fight, has left the world a fine example of field sports in 'The Boar Hunt, in our National Gallery, a picture which was bought for two thousand two hundred pounds from Lord Cowley.
He had arrested and imprisoned my page on the charge of having warned me, "for otherwise," he said, "the Venetian gentleman would never have gone to the house of Chevalier Mengs, where he is out of my power."
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