The Malatestas of Rimini.

NOTES AND DETAILS.

It is a centre for many memories, this little town of Rimini, set in the plain by the Adriatic. Here ruled and ravaged the Mastin Vecchio of Dante. The eyes of Francesca and her lover remember eternally these yellow sands. Here Parisina left her innocence. Here dwelt Gismondo, prince of traitors. And there are older memories than these. Yet in the city whence Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, whence Augustus began the great Flaminian Way, we remember, not Cæsar or Augustus, but that strange, brave, cruel, perfidious race of petty despots, whose encroaching personality and whose genius for architecture has left an enduring trace on the cities of Romagna.

Pesaro, Fano, Cesena, Verruchio, and many another town owned the unquiet sway of these Malatestas, and found them a perverse and twisted race, shot with opposite qualities. They were a race of wrongheads, as their surname tells us. Criminal often and yet not merely vicious, having some great thought in them mostly, some fine intention still manifest through the error of their lives, many oftheir vices were due to circumstance. A dominant, courageous race of princelings, mostly illegitimate, never sure of their tenure, it was only by unquestioned autocracy and a never-relaxed grasp that they could secure their state from inner and outer ravage. Their hand was against every man, and every man’s against them. Not only the Pope anxious to enlarge his Venetian frontier, and Venice eager for another province on the Adriatic seaboard; not only the Duke of Urbino, the hereditary foe, perched like an eagle on the hills above, watching the unguarded moment to pounce upon his prey: not only these, and Sforza and Arragon, but every brother or cousin of the house, from his petty stronghold in the plain, was ready to snatch from the lord of Rimini, his dearly held supremacy.

Such absolute power in the present, with such uncertain future, is above all things dangerous to heady natures. The Malatestas grew mad sometimes with their unrestrained indulgence, mad with cruelty and wild debauch; but we repeat they were not merely vicious. They were strong, cunning, brave unto death, ambitious; they knew how to make their subjects love them; they left their little seaside village a monument of art, and made their few miles of plain a power in Italy.

In 1427 there was no lawful heir to this long-enriched possession. Carlo Malatesta, twice married, lived in childish state at Rimini: Pandolfo of Fano, dying in 1427, left no heir from his three brides; but, in bequeathing to his brother Carlo his estate of Fano, he also sent to him three natural children, still youngboys, for whom both uncle and father had in vain attempted to obtain a bull of legitimation. Powerful enemies stood in their path. By excluding these children, Malatesta of Pesaro on the one hand, and Frederic of Urbino on the other, hoped to succeed to Rimini and Fano; and for long they persuaded the Pope to their own interests. But Carlo Malatesta was not easily thwarted.

This Carlo was in many ways the most honourable of his race; a righteous, moral, pious soldier and captain, much such another as those who saved England under Cromwell. It is recorded of him that, entering Mantua in triumph on the morning of Virgil’s birthday, he found the great irregular square there full of revellers, dancing and singing and crowning with wreaths of flowers the statue of the poet. Whereat, incensed at such worship paid to a vain heathen idol, he led up his soldiers to the pedestal and bade them throw the statue into the Mincio; which being done, or reported to be done, such a chorus of blame and indignation rose throughout the humanistic Hellenist Italy of that day as not one of the orgies, crimes, brutalities, and lusts of Carlo’s kinsmen had ever wakened. All this gave little discomfiture to Carlo, himself in his way a connoisseur of art and letters, and the first patron of the young Ghiberti, whom he employed to decorate the Gattolo at Rimini. Seldom indeed was Rimini so enviable as during the long and prosperous reign of Carlo. But in 1429 Carlo died.

Just before his death he had procured the legitimation of his nephews. He was succeeded by Galeotto,the eldest, a lad of seventeen, who found a heavy load in the much-battered helmet and sheath left empty for him. Many hungry eyes adverse to him were fixed already on that jacent helm; Frederic of Urbino and the faithless cousin of Pesaro were ranked close beneath the city gates; the more ready to snatch his inheritance because Eugene IV., the newly elected Pope, discussed with much dislike and doubt the legitimation granted to Carlo by his predecessor. The Pope, represented by Urbino, claimed Rimini as devolving to the See; Sforza and Pesaro, each for himself, were ready to contest it with him. What chance against such tremendous odds had Galeotto, seventeen years old, weak in health, illegitimate, with no great ally to enforce his claims?

A more inadequate champion the mind cannot imagine. No David eager to fight the giant, this Galeotto Malatesta, but a wan, emaciated youth, half-crazed, half-saint. In the middle of the panic, with the horror of a triple sack maddening the miserable Riminese, this prince left the city to dwell in the monastery of Arcangelo, outside the gates. There he passed his days serene, scathless in the midst of peril; neither for himself nor his kingdom taking any thought.

So strange this spectacle, so awful, that the very enemies of Rimini stopped in their onslaught amazed. The lion, it is said, will not attack a sleeping prey. Eugene, the Pope (in his temporal character the deadly foe of Rimini), wrote to its lord, bidding him remember the imperative duties of his position. The letter reached that “magnificent man and potentprince” in the monastery at Arcangelo, where clad in the coarse robes of a Franciscan friar, he led an ascetic, starved, and mutilated life. What was the magnificence of earthto himto him? So harsh were his self-inflicted penances that the wounds on his body never ceased to bleed. What had he to do with rule and governance? The brothers of the monastery, and the young virgin wife who drooped and paled at his side, were all of mankind he knew or saw; and he himself the chief of sinners. Neither Pope nor armies could force him back to earth. Thus friends and foes alike failed to touch him; there was no pity in the heart of Galeotto the Saint.

Or rather—common, yet tragical transmutation of the Middle Ages—his pity took a retrospective turn; dead and dry to the present woes it might relieve, it rushed back in a mighty impotent tide to the foot of that sacred and awful Cross, whose divine tragedy was the continual spectacle of the saintly life. Pity for the dead Christ—throbbing, yearning, helpless, and indignant pity for the agonized Saviour—this surely lay at the bottom of all crusades, tortures, persecutions, inquisitions of the Middle Ages. Living ever with the crucifix in sight, dwelling ever and solely in presence of that dread expiation-such fanatics as Galeotto forgot the example of the life of Christ in the terror and pity of Golgotha. Vengeance on the enemies of God! vengeance on the traitors who still stab and crucify the ever newly sacrificed God and Victim! so ran the tenor of mediæval piety. And the contagion of this fanatic sentiment slaughtered the armies of the East, tossed Albigensian babies onto lance-points, and roasted before a ribald soldiery the pious Vaudois women; the martyrs of Saint Bartholomew and the martyrs of Smithfield were hewn and burned by the strength of it; and from its armoury the Inquisition drew its deadliest weapons.

Thus Galeotto, unmoved by the misery of the people who, owing allegiance to him, died, starved, and sorrowed for his sake, was nevertheless, not without his private schemes of sanctity and militant devotion. High thoughts were born in that narrow mind, as in the intervals of penance and office the lord of Rimini paced the monastery garden. Monk as he was by life and feeling, he too had his ambition; he too had his work to fulfil. And here solved that the Jews should be cast out from Rimini.

Months went on, and the details of his scheme matured in the brain of the cloistered prince; but, meanwhile, his foes pressed closer and closer round him, and there was no leader to lead the few forlorn troops out to battle; yet ruin stared upon the city nearer every day, and now or never must the decisive step be taken. Still Galeotto prayed and dreamed in his cell at Arcangelo. But an unsuspected deliverer was in Rimini. One autumn night in 1430, secret to most of the citizens, a desperate sally was made from the gates of the town. A short, brisk uncertain conflict in the terrifying darkness, and the surprised armies were driven back, ignorant of the small number of their assailants. And as in the dawn, the conqueror led his troops back inside the gates, flushed and triumphant, the people crowded out into the streets to look at him and bless him, crying that thegreat days of Carlo and of Verruchio had returned; and behold this saviour of the city was the brother and heir of Galeotto—was the boy Sigismond, or Gismondo, Malatesta, not yet thirteen years old!

Whether the Pope and the oncoming armies perceived that at last they had a substantive enemy to deal with, or whether touched with compassion by so much youthful daring, they concluded a peace with Rimini only a few days after the successful sally. A ruinous peace indeed; forfeiting many broad lands and territories in return for the acknowledgment of the true right to Rimini, Fano, and Cesena of these legitimized Malatestas. But the people were thankful for any peace, and Galeotto easily yielded, seeing here the needed opportunity to prove his piety. He signed the treaty on consideration that the Holy Father would authorize him to expel the Jews from Rimini.

It was a cruel step. This plain by the Adriatic had long been a refuge to the outcast nation, who brought thither their genius for wealth, their industry, and their abundance. It was represented to Galeotto that the fortunes of Rimini were bound up with the presence of these patient and long-enduring exiles. They had given no cause for just offence; they had, indeed, offered to defray the heavy amnesty exacted by the Pope; and to banish them would yet further enfeeble the war-shattered city. The Pope, indeed, perceived these thing; but neither gratitude, policy, nor compassion, weighed with the fanatic Galeotto. “Better starve,” thought he, “than favour the enemies of Christ.” So the law went forth, and when the winter made doubly dreary the wide sandy war-ravagedplains, a melancholy train of miserable outcasts set out from the city they had enriched; banished and ruined for no fault of their own, with no home before them, and leaving behind them, uprooted and strengthless as it seemed, the fortunes of the little town.

So the edict ran, and many went out in exile scarcely was the exodus completed when Galeotto died. His fasts and scourgings, his long-continued vigils had worn out his life at twenty years of age. No hermit of the Thebaid had lived more sparsely or hardly than this prince of the pagan renaissance. He was borne to his grave in the monastery churchyard as simply as any other brother; four monks of the order bore his bier, holding flaming torches. They laid him to rest the poor half-mad, self-absorbed visionary. And all the people mourned him, forgiving his injuries because he was a saint; and also, it may be, for some endearing quality in his thwarted nature which does not reach us across the gulf of years. For his virgin widow Margaret of Este loved him and mourned him through all the days of her long life, never marrying again, and praying on her deathbed to be buried at his feet; and the city was proud of Galeotto the Saint. Nevertheless, life appeared more possible now that he was dead.

Galeotto was scarcely buried when new troubles burst upon the city. Urbino and Pesaro laid siege to Lungarino, one of the fiefs of the Riminese. Grief and fear again awoke in the harassed and impoverished town; but in this trouble Sigismond saw his opportunity. He had chafed and fumed andwasted under the regency of the two widows, his sister-in-law and his aunt. He, a conqueror at thirteen, was surely at fifteen able to rule a city. A daring scheme presented itself to the impatient boy; a scheme which, chance what might, would he knew but increase his favour with the people, however the Ladies-Regent might bewail it. He escaped in disguise from Rimini, and having given notice to his old adherents, collected them outside the walls, and gaining new battalions as he marched towards Lungarino, won a tremendous victory there—a victory which utterly routed Urbino and Pesaro, and proved Sigismond Malatesta one of the most valiant champions in Italy.

After this there could be no question of petticoat-government. At home and abroad this lad of fifteen had established his right both to govern and to combat. In this same year (1432) he reconciled Rimini with the Pope, and concluded an alliance with Venice. In his new friendship with the great sea-city he engaged himself to the daughter of Carmagnola, receiving a portion of the dowry in advance. But quickly on this betrothal followed the disgrace and execution of Carmagnola, and it is characteristic of Gismondo (no less perfidious than brave, grasping than lavish), that, refusing to ally himself with a traitor’s daughter, he equally refused to restore her dowry.

A better-omened betrothal, as it seemed, followed this next year, when Sigismond engaged himself to Ginevra, the sister of Margaret, his brother’s widow, and daughter of his friend and ally the powerful Marquisof Este. There was high festival both at the betrothal and the marriage; Sigismund the Emperor stayed the same year in the town; it was an occasion of much pageantry. New and better days seemed dawning on Rimini; and when the Pope gave the seventeen-year-old Gismondo the command of the troops of the Church, and restored some of his confiscated territory, it was evident that good fortune was secure.

Gismondo knew how to be generous and prudent. Before departing on his campaign he bestowed the city and lands of Cesena on his brother Domenico, premising that, in any imminent battle where both were concerned, Domenico should range himself with the powers opposed to Gismondo, so that in any case fortune should not desert the Malatestas. A prudent, balanced tactic, well worthy of those slow-moving Condottiere battles, when war was as much a game as chess, and to keep the rules of the game as important as to win. Leaving his city, therefore, with a beneficed protector close at hand, Gismondo set out on his career as a soldier of fortune.

For three years he fought almostcontinuouslycontinuously, gaining great glory for himself in the cause of the Church, besides in his own cause opposing the Duke of Urbino. And in 1438, having at last the leisure to sit at home for a while in peace, he found a new labour ready to his hand. Built for a palace rather than as a fort, the Gattolo of the Malatestas offered them little security in case of war. Gismondo, no less active as military engineer than as captain or art-patron, determined to have it down and build in itsstead a Rocca from his own design, to rank among the strongest in Italy. Calling to his aid Roberto Valturio, the great military engineer of Romagna, Sigismond began that famous Rocca of which to-day only a tower remains, mellowed and faded by the sea winds of centuries, grown over with lichen and sprouting wallflowers: only a tower in the sand, disfigured and insulted by the modern prison built against it, and of which it forms a part.

For the Rocca soon outlived its purpose. By some strange want of foresight, some hapless piece of amateurish ignorance, this great pile, the first built in Italy since the invention of artillery, was planned with no regard to the changed conditions of warfare. Not till sixty years after did some wiser engineer invent the system of bastions; so that, for all its strength, the mighty Rocca of Sigismond was to some extent a waste of labour. Yet by the building of it hangs a tale; through it we approach the greatest influence of Gismondo’s life; a memory imperishably united with his own.

While the Gattolo, or palace of the Malatestas, was being levelled to make way for the new fortress, Sigismond removed his household to the Palazzo Roelli in the Via Sta. Croce. Besides his servants and his secretary, he brought with him his miserable wife. Constantly outraged by his infidelities, Ginevra d’Este had cause not only for grief, but for fear. One child had died, and Gismondo had no heir by the woman whom he had married to unite his still unstable house with the powerful lords of Ferrara. He chafed at her presence, useless and undesired.

Close to the Palazzo Roelli stood the Palazzo del Cimiero, where Francesco degli Atti, a merchant of noble birth, lived in sufficient state and splendour with his young son and his motherless daughter Isotta.

A strange girl this neighbour of Sigismond’s. Not beautiful, according to the busts and medals that record her features—an imperious, resolute, tenacious creature, imposing her personality like a yoke upon all who knew her. Hard-featured, long-necked, and thin, with perhaps in the large eyes burning under the tense raised eyebrows, a certain feverish, eager beauty to excuse the general panegyric of her contemporaries. An expression of patience, of great constancy, and endurance in the long-lipped, close-shut mouth, with the strong lines round it, in the long square of the face, in the beautiful resolute chin. The face expresses character rather than genius; we behold in it far-seeing resolve, and patience. The reputation of great learning remains with Isotta, despite the modern authorities who, on somewhat insufficient evidence, assure us that she could not write. By some means, at all events, by reading and writing, or by learned conversation and lonely thought, this Isotta gained an eminence among the women of her age for learning and talent, for prudence, and the faculty of government.

Fœmina belligera et fortis: thus the chronicle of Rimini describes her. A nature not immoral, but unscrupulous, a woman in whom will, passion, and intellect were strong enough each to balance the other. Isotta gained an influence over the perverse, defiant, passionate Gismondo which raised her to a positionin the state far superior to that of the lawful wife; a position in which the lax morality of her age saw little disgraceful or revolting.

That Isotta felt it there is ample evidence. Taking Battaglini’s date (1438) as the true commencement of her relations with Gismondo she must have been young, certainly under twenty, when she took the first fatal all-involving step on that road of dishonour she was so long to tread. Young in age, she was younger probably by circumstance; this silent, sequestered, thoughtful girl, with neither mother nor sister to confide in. Her father raved and stormed, and then forgave her: I think, remembering a certain beseeching, miserable, unfortunate letter of hers written fifteen years later, that she did not forgive herself. Not the public union of her cipher with Gismondo’s, not the corps of courtly poetasters occupied in chantingIsottæto her glory, not the medals struck in her honour, nor the eternal monument prepared, could make this stern proud woman forget that she was her lover’s mistress only, after all. Nay, would she not silently, bitterly resent in her inmost heart this blazoning of her shame? “Voliatte avere chompasione a mi poveretta, diate vero spozamento piui presto che viui posette—Take pity on me, poor me,” she cries; “give me true marriage as quickly as you can. Ah, put an end to this thing, which always keeps me enraged. Sempre me tene arabiatta.” So she cries in her flat, soft dialect; and must cry long enough, poor Isotta.

Yet he was in his fashion faithful to her. He always returned to her, trusted her, counted on herservice and her sacrifice. There was none could govern the city so well in his absence, counsel him, give up all for him—jewels, safety, honour itself. And in return he summoned great artists to do her honour, and instituted the elegiacIsottæ, strained and fanciful praises, according to the fashion of the time, of which none are so pregnant, so full of meaning as those of this fierce, unfaithful, constant-lover himself. Through the quaint out-dated garb we catch here and there a glimpse of the man’s own nature—of his defiant will, his acute and painful sensibility to beauty, his almost sublime self-preoccupation and intensity. We discern that he is a man who ever felt the eyes of posterity upon him, and yet a fierce, passionate, shameful man; suddenly falling into crime, sceptical of punishment, yet inherently superstitious; vibrating through and through with passion, tainted through and through with hereditary perfidy; half mad, yet with a touch of genius and greatness in this chaotic mass of wickedness and fraud.

Suddenly an end came, for the moment, to this rhyme-repentance. A fearful crime stopped for a day or two the verse-making and recitations. On the 8th of September, 1440, the poor ineffectual Ginevra d’Este died, having taken (so the rumour went) her fatal draught of poison from her husband’s hands.

Sigismond was now free to marry a wife who would bring him legal heirs; Isotta cannot have doubted that she would be that woman. But Gismondo, the ardent lover and writer of verses, was not of the character to throw away so valuable a chance ofalliance. He possessed Isotta already, and she had no powerful supporters. In 1442 he married Polissena Sforza, the natural daughter of Francesco Sforza, that magnificent soldier of fortune, already on the alert to seize (when death should offer him the chance) his father-in-law’s rich Duchy of Milan.

The chance was to come soon enough; but for a year or two after Gismondo’s marriage old Visconti lingered on, and Polissena’s father held his peace. Meanwhile, war being slack, Gismondo progressed admirably in his work of remodelling Rimini. In 1446 the Rocca was at length complete; and in the same year he began a yet bolder and more splendid undertaking. The old church of San Francesco, a Gothic building of no great beauty, displeased his Hellenicized humanistic culture. To him it represented nothing—that simple Gothic church raised by the monks to God. Gismondo resolved to convert it into a temple, a temple still dedicated nominally to St. Francis, but in reality to become an eternal monument of Sigismondo and Isotta.

Gismondo called to his aid some of the greatest artists of this time: Matteo da Pasti, the medallist, to execute the great marble medallions of himself, to be set up everywhere in the holy place; Ciuffagni for the statutes (a miserable choice), Simone Ferrucci for the bas-reliefs of playing children, Agostino Duccio, that exquisite draughtsman in marble, to carve in low relief the yellow-white plaques with allegorical figures, whose flowing lines of floating and twisted drapery, small well-poised heads, wonderful grace of attitude, and refined exotic type, recall thelate Greek bas-reliefs rather than the solid, somewhat squat forms of Donatello and his school, or the angular delicacy of Mino. Over all these Gismondo set Leon Battista Alberti, a man almost as universal in his attributes as Leonardo himself. Alberti was to be the architect, and assign with Matteo’s aid their several parts to each of his co-operators. No easy task, this of Alberti’s; for Gismondo—with a flash of the native superstition which shot so strangely athwart his paganism—refused to destroy the consecrated walls of the older building. The architect must build his Hellenic temple on to the framework of a thirteenth-century Gothic church. Fortunately, the form of the early edifice, its wide nave and simple sanctuary not greatly differing from the Roman Basilica, rendered the conversion within the limits of possibility, and Alberti appears to have enjoyed the difficulty of his task. Perhaps he saw in this endeavour to fuse into one splendid whole the opposite characters of Gothic mediævalism and Greek antiquity, the opportunity to immortalize the spirit of his time—and the result was success. It is built, this temple of Rimini, of Roman stones from Classis, antique slabs from Greece, and of the Adriatic clay fused long ago by pious hands. Augustan arches rise without, sheltering the sarcophagi of philosophers, and within, the light from mediæval windows falls on the altar of a Christian saint. A pagan church, with pointed Gothic arches raised on sculptured classic pillars, a splendid anomaly, chiefly original by its combination of opposing elements, it is a type of the Italian Renaissance.

Finding it impossible to turn the Gothic front with its deep porch and rosace to any classical account, Alberti resolved to inclose it in a marble casing, distant at all points by nearly four feet from the original structure. He was now free to plan his façade, singularly simple in design, yet solemn, beautiful, and stately in its plainness. From a breast-high plinth, giving a noble base to the whole structure, start three engaged arches, the central one larger than the others and higher in relief; the span of all three is extremely wide, their proportions being borrowed from the Roman arch of Augustus close at hand. At the corners of the façade and on either side of the central arch stand four fluted columns with florid capitals; rising from the plinth they support a heavy, deep-shadowed cornice. Sculptured votive wreaths, six in all, are hung between the capitals of the columns and the spandrel of the arches. From the deep cornice above rises the pediment, unfinished and irregular, its supporting columns incomplete. Above this again should have sprung a cupola, vaulting the entire church in its wide span; but in its stead a temporary roof still patches the never-finished masterpiece.

In the hollow space between the façade and the old brick fronting is placed the tomb of Sigismond, accessible from the interior. But on the lateral fronts there is no such space, for here the round wide arches are not merely in relief, but detached: and in the recesses great stone sarcophagi are placed, standing on the red-cornered plinth. In these repose the bones of the humanists and philosophers of Gismondo’scourt. When the temple was built there was made room for fourteen sarcophagi to stand there to inclose the most honourable ashes in Italy; but the fate of incompletion which has overtaken the temple has not spared this grandiose design. Only seven tombs stand upon the plinth, seven other empty arches keep no illustrious dead.

Passing through the low door under the central arch of the façade we are amazed by the rich and strange impression of the interior—doubly impressive after the severity outside. The nave is furnished with eight side chapels inclosed by a high balustrade; there are four on each side, the two central ones being in double bays, while a considerable wall space divides the first and last on either side from these. The wall between the arches, divided by slender columns, is tinted alternately with pale sea-green and the lightest red; the frieze bears the same tints; across it are swung heavy festoons of yellow-white marble. The sculptured pillars and railings of the chapels are also tinted with like delicate colours. Ferrucci’s bas-reliefs of playing children stand out against a ground of palest, unglazed, greenish-blue, and below these the balustrade is simply white, while beneath Agostino’s delicate untinted low-reliefs the railing is of the richest deep-red breccia, elaborately sculptured with double-headed elephants. Behind Ciuffagni’s rude figures the background is of dull gold, while here and there on all sides a tinge of gold faintly lines and splashes the yellowish marble. On the frieze, on the shields of the putti, over the doorways, on the columns and the tombs, above the veryheads of the saints in their chapels, we find the double cipher of Sigismond and his mistress. The saints themselves are not safe. Isotta wears the robes and wings of St. Michael. Over the chapel balustrades flourishes her rose, and the image of Sigismond is carved upon the pillars. So that from pedestal to cornice the whole great church is one memorial of the passion that defied it.

Many great artists worked to complete the beauty of Sigismond’s temple; but until quite lately the name of the sculptor of the most perfect of these panels was undetermined.[110]M. Yriarte has told us that we owe them to a certain Florentine cutpurse, Agostino di Duccio. The fact is patent. Never having read M. Yriarte’s learned and precious volume, I came to Rimini straight from Perugia, straight from Duccio’s wonderful façade of San Bernardino. That façade, those figures so admirable in their poise, that sweeping drapery full of intricate line and harmony, those heads, small, and graceful, with the exotic beauty and rapture of expression, had produced on me the strongest, the most durable impression. A few days after, finding in the decorations of two chapels at Rimini the same strange poetic grace, the same exquisite attitude, the same wavy lines, low relief, and classic feeling, I could not but recognize the master. And so, no doubt, has many another chance traveller, such as I, lacking authority without M. Yriarte and his documents—thoughwithout documents the fact itself is surely clear. For the existence of two monuments so strikingly original and singularly alike as the San Bernardino of Perugia and the Cappella di San Gaudenzio at Rimini must surely be due to one hand. The very details of the ornament, the characteristic round sweeps of drapery, like a wind-blown scarf; the exceeding lowness of relief, almost as if drawn on the stone; the type of head, with inspired glance and lips frequently apart are all the graces—the mannerisms even—of one master. That master one would, from the strange beauty of expression in these figures, have judged to be a Sienese, were not the authorship of San Bernardino graven across its front:Opus Augustini Florentini Lapicidæ, MCCCCLXI. It is difficult to imagine how a Florentine, a pupil of Donatello’s, could acquire that tall and ripely-slender severity of form, that exquisite freedom of hand; nor does he take his style from the school of the Robbias. In its distinguishing characteristics his manner is unlike any of the great Italian masters. By a bold hypothesis we might account for it with satisfaction by supposing that among those many slabs and lids of marble which Gismondo brought from Greece for the building of the temple there may have been some precious fragment of classic bas-relief not overlooked by the keen-eyed cutpurse and sculptor; who thence-forwards proved himself a master among the masters of his day, first at Rimini and later at Perugia.

The subjects of these designs of Duccio’s have troubled many generations. In the chapel of the Holy Sacrament, the planets, the twelve signs of theZodiac, and a series of animals magnificently treated, form the decoration. In the Chapel of San Gaudenzio, the subjects are the Muses, Virtues, and other allegorical figures. M. Yriarte has proved that this strange assemblage illustrates a long passage in one of Gismondo’s poems to Isotta; and it appears likely that Alberti, himself an author, gave the passage to Duccio for a text. Of a series of thirty-six exquisite bas-reliefs it is impossible to give much description here; but I would advise all lovers of Renaissance sculpture to procure, at least, Alinari’s photographs of theDiana, theAgriculture, theMedicine, theBotany, and thePoetryfrom Rimini, and to compare these with the exquisite designs of a woman catching together at the knees the folds of her wind-blown mantle, from the façade of San Bernardino.

Sigismond compelled haste from the artists who served him. This temple, of which the corner-stone was laid in 1446, was, by his most earnest desire, to be fit for service and consecration in 1450, the great Jubilee year at Rome. And this in fact was done; the dome was not yet planned, and a flat wooden roof crowned the building; the transept was scarce begun; the façade broken off almost at the base of the pediment; but the nave with its bays was finished, a wonder of sculpture and colour. And as it was opened in 1450 so we behold it to-day.

A strange ceremony it must have been, that Jubilee service in the newly-opened temple. The prelates and great dignitaries of the church meet, appalled, in that splendid shrine to Diva Isotta, which a little later the Pope should adduce as absolute and sufficientproof of the paganism of its founder. From door to transept, from pedestal to cornice, no memento of Christ; only everywhere the I.S. of Isotta and her lover mocking the sacredmonogrammonogram; and the rose of the prince’s mistress where there should have been the crown of thorns. Diva Isotta herself would be there in all her glory; she had furnished from her private purse the funds for her chapel of St. Michael, where her likeness filled the robes of the saint, where, shadowed with the blazons of Sigismond and standing on the Malatestan elephants, her sarcophagus stood ready. There, also, must have been the hapless Polissena, condemned to witness this triumph of her rival, condemned to praise the chapel in Isotta’s honour, while seeing nowhere in all that splendid church a corner dedicated to herself, nor any memorial of the dead Ginevra.

Hapless Polissena! Even then her husband was treating with the Pope to legitimize his children by Isotta. She had no children. Even before that ominous festival her husband had made the war of succession at Milan against her father. Her claims on him were breaking, one by one. And when the peace was made, and the Pope gave Sigismond, with Sinigaglia, the legitimation of his children, she must have thought bitterly of Ginevra’s end. Indeed a few weeks afterwards she too died suddenly, terribly. Not poison this time, the rumour went. Gismondo, they said, had strangled her with a napkin.

None dared accuse him then. He was at the height of his power and formidable triumph—at the summit, the climax, beyond which is no ascent. Yeteven then he had made a deadly enemy, scorned at present, but who knew how to wait. Not Sforza, who seems to have taken the loss of his daughter with strange indifference. It was the perfidy and not the violence of Sigismond that wrought his ruin. Engaged to fight for Arragon in the war of the Milanese succession, he had received in advance a large portion of his pay. Then the Florentines sought to tempt him from his allegiance. With true Tuscan shrewdness they chose for their agent no Medici, no magnificent money-bag or puissant general—but Gianozzo Manetti the Humanist. Him and his rare manuscripts they send into Gismondo’s camp; and as the scholar treats with the great captain, he shows him such-and-such a precious Greek fragment, or a perfect copy of Virgil—or the Platonists, pointing without too obvious intention the superior culture of Florence to barbarous Arragon. Gismondo, fascinated, stepped into the snare. The next day he deserted to Florence, refusing, moreover, to restore the immense wage he had drawn from the Duke of Arragon for services never to be rendered. Nor at the time was there any redress for that prince; but the time of vengeance was to come.

Meanwhile, incautious, believing that he could compass heaven and earth between his courage and his perfidy, Sigismond earned yet more of the traitor’s wages. Scarcely was the peace of Lodi signed (in 1454), than he hired himself and his troops to the Republic of Siena in their quarrel against the lord of Pittigliano. Again he deserted to the enemy, thinking to make a better bargain with him. The Sienesesent him his demission, “in terms of great courtesy and haughtiness,” but denounced his treachery to all the great powers with which they were allied, including Arragon. He, perceiving in this double proof of treachery, sufficient cause for a quarrel, sent Piccinino, the greatest soldier of fortune of his day, against the wall of Rimini. Yet all was not lost; for Sforza came to the aid of his son-in-law. Had Sigismond stuck to his sword all might have gone well; but of late he had become perilously adept in the traitor’s cunning trade. He despatched a secret message to René, king of Anjou, offering—in return for present help—to invade the kingdom of Naples, oust Alfonso of Arragon and restore it to the Angevines. René accepted, and landed at Genoa, but only in time to learn the sudden death of Alfonso. Sforza, learning all the details of the scheme, withdrew his forces from Rimini, alienated once and for ever from the traitor who would call the French to settle his quarrels; for Sforza, as we know, had reasons for wishing the kinsman of Charles of Orleans well on the other side the Alps. At this moment the succession of a Sienese, Æneas-Sylvius Piccolomini, to the papal throne under the title of Pius II., left Gismondo without a friend in Italy, five years after his triumphs in war and in peace of the glorious year 1450.

Little time now for temple-building. Gismondo, before Siena, had amused himself with drawing out plans for the dome in intervals of battles and traitorous despatches. He now found enough to do in keeping Piccinino at bay. The Angevines were of no service; they had but estranged the sympathies ofItaly from his cause. He tried even, it is said, to tempt the universal enemy of Christendom, the Grand Turk himself, to espouse his cause. There is no knowing to what lengths he would not go in his lonely, impotent, swift despair, and defiant ruin; and it is possible that he may have remembered the examples of Carlo Zeno and the great Visconti. One good and wise thing, at least, Gismondo did in these terrible years of friendless battle. He married the faithful Isotta, who proved herself a right valiant defender and regent of his city.

Meanwhile the Pope had enrolled himself among the active enemies of Sigismond. Siena was avenged. Amid great state and ceremony the effigy of Gismondo Malatesta was burned in the streets of Rome; interdict and excommunication were pronounced against him. Parricide, murderer of old men and innocent women, committer of adultery and incest, prince of traitors, enemy of God and man: so ran the terms of this tremendous accusation. But the Pope was not contented merely to accuse. He threatened not only Gismondo with his anathema, but whatsoever nation or army should arise to help him. Having thus disabled his enemy, he sent his forces against Rimini.

Sigismond, maddened and desperate, looked vainly round for an ally. Siena, Arragon, Florence, Milan, all were hostile, or at best neutral. Yet help must be found. Almost alone, facing a hundred perils, Gismondo trudged across the Apennines to the kingdom of Naples in search of his fatal friends the Angevines. But from them he got no help, not a promise even. Back to Rimini, desperate, baited, hurried themiserable Sigismond. Finding the towns still held out, he took to the sea, and went to Venice—praying in his abject extremity for succour, for protection. And the Venetians, bound to him by old ties, did indeed afford him a slender assistance. By the aid of this he escaped death and flagrant ruin. The Pope made peace with him, though only on condition that he and his brother Domenico should make public penance for their misdeeds at Rome, resigning all their possessions save their capitals and a few castles, which also must devolve to the Holy See after the deaths of their present lords. And to these terms he consented. Nothing but his sword and his city were now left to the once triumphant Sigismond. Leaving Rimini to the staunch Isotta—fœmina belligera et fortis—he hired himself to the Venetians, to conduct their forces against the Turks in the Morea. Here a faint shadow of his former glory played for a while around him; and in 1465 Gismondo returned to Rimini, enriched, and bringing with him as his dearest possession the bones of Gemisthus Pletho, the Platonist, to place in the first sarcophagus of the temple.

Within the year Pius II. died, and Paul II. reigned in the Vatican. The new pontiff called Sigismond to Rome, and there concluded with him what seemed a most favourable treaty. But Gismondo was no sooner back in Rimini than the Pope, jealous of Venice, proposed to him to cede his city to Rome, in exchange for Spoleto and Foligno. When Sigismond comprehended this proposal a veritable madness seemed to seize him. Resign Rimini, the city he had saved atthirteen, had fought for ever since, had spent his whole life and fortune in embellishing! He and Isotta and his sons go into exile in the marshes of Foligno! Rimini, with the Rocca and temple of his building, with the tombs of centuries of ancestors—Rimini, with its salts and its seaboards—yieldthat? Sigismond sent no answer to the Pope; but mad, in a burning fever, he journeyed by day and night to Rome. His attendants noticed that he never slept, that he clutched under his coat a dagger, never relaxed. Arrived at Rome, he went instantly to the Vatican, demanding a private audience; but the Pope, warned, it may be, appointed a meeting for the morrow. Then he received the lord of Rimini, guarded by a great concourse of princes and cardinals. Sigismond had not foreseen such a reception. Gazing wildly, and clutching still the ineffectual hidden dagger which he could not use, he made what terms he could, since revenge was impossible. The right to remain in Rimini was finally conceded him, but under the pretext of a captainship of troops the Pope kept him far from home, employed in petty guerilla warfare. A year later the fever had gained a fearful hold upon him. He dragged himself back to Rimini, to Isotta. Impoverished, friendless, powerless, the city was at least his own to die in. His last thoughts were for Isotta and her children, left friendless in an unkind world. Thus he died, the great Malatesta.

110. I take this occasion of expressing much indebtedness to M. Yriarte’s charming and elaborate volume,“Un Condottiere du XV. Siècle, Gismondo Malatesta.”

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