Part 21

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.

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. Yet even 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.