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.