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-ravaged
plains, 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 and wasted 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
Marquis of 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 almost continuously, 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 its stead 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 position in 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 chanting _Isottæ_ to 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 her service 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 elegiac _Isottæ_, 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 of alliance. 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 the late 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’s court.
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 very heads 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—though without 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.
Footnote 110:
I take this occasion of expressing much indebtedness to M. Yriarte’s
charming and elaborate volume, “Un Condottiere du XV. Siècle, Gismondo
Malatesta.”
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 the Zodiac, 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 the _Diana_, the
_Agriculture_, the _Medicine_, the _Botany_, and the _Poetry_ from
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 sufficient proof 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 sacred monogram; 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.