The Pot of Basil by Bernard Capes — Read

The Italy of the eighteenth century has always given me a sense of distressing incongruity, such a sense of incongruity as I feel in the presence of performing animals, pitifully and patiently caricaturing their own native dignity in forced postures and mirthless habiliments. To see a petticoated elephant seated on a stool drinking tea, to see a dog on his hind legs, with a shako on his head, shouldering a musket, makes me, I confess, uneasy and ashamed. So in the land of the Visconti, of the Sforza, of the Medici, a land where both the magnificence of crime and the magnificence of achievement have always gone habited in a certain appropriate splendour, akin to that of the leopard in his forest and the tiger in his jungle, the vision of powder and patches, with their concomitants of mincing uncleanness and affectation, seems an outrage on one's conception of the accepted fitness of things.

If you would study that incongruity, as at least I feel it, in its more plausible phases, turn to the finer works of Canaletto; if in its grossest, read the memoirs of that arch-scoundrel Casanova -- memoirs which to me, a fond enough student of the period in its prettier aspects, reek with that sort of fetor which gets into one's clothes, as it were, and for a time infects all healthier savours.