These two points accomplished, he went in search of the painter who was to paint the sign; and he was soon found.He was an old Italian, a rival of the Raphaels and the Caracci, but an unfortunate rival.He said he was of the Venetian school, doubtless from his fondness for color.His works, of which he had never sold one, attracted the eye at a distance of a hundred paces; but they so formidably displeased the citizens, that he had finished by painting no more.
He boasted of having painted a bath-room for Madame la Marechale d'Ancre, and mourned over this chamber having been burnt at the time of the marechal's disaster.
Cropoli, in his character of a compatriot, was indulgent towards Pittrino, which was the name of the artist.Perhaps he had seen the famous pictures of the bath-room.Be this as it may, he held in such esteem, we may say in such friendship, the famous Pittrino, that he took him in his own house.
Pittrino, grateful, and fed with macaroni, set about propagating the reputation of this national dish, and from the time of its founder, he had rendered, with his indefatigable tongue, signal services to the house of Cropoli.
As he grew old he attached himself to the son as he had done to the father, and by degrees became a kind of overlooker of a house in which his remarkable integrity, his acknowledged sobriety, and a thousand other virtues useless to enumerate, gave him an eternal place by the fireside, with a right of inspection over the domestics.Besides this, it was he who tasted the macaroni, to maintain the pure flavor of the ancient tradition; and it must be allowed that he never permitted a grain of pepper too much, or an atom of parmesan too little.His joy was at its height on that day when called upon to share the secret of Cropoli the younger, and to paint the famous sign.
He was seen at once rummaging with ardor in an old box, in which he found some brushes, a little gnawed by the rats, but still passable; some colors in bladders almost dried up;some linseed-oil in a bottle, and a palette which had formerly belonged to Bronzino, that dieu de la pittoure, as the ultramontane artist, in his ever young enthusiasm, always called him.
Pittrino was puffed up with all the joy of a rehabilitation.
He did as Raphael had done -- he changed his style, and painted, in the fashion of the Albanian, two goddesses rather than two queens.These illustrious ladies appeared so lovely on the sign, -- they presented to the astonished eyes such an assemblage of lilies and roses, the enchanting result of the change of style in Pittrino -- they assumed the poses of sirens so Anacreontically -- that the principal echevin, when admitted to view this capital piece in the salle of Cropole, at once declared that these ladies were too handsome, of too animated a beauty, to figure as a sign in the eyes of passers-by.