ry to note these facts in
passing; just as when we are surveying the history of letters and the
arts, it becomes us to remember the crimes and the madness of the
despots who patronized them. This was an age in which even the wildest
and most perfidious of tyrants felt the ennobling influences and the
sacred thirst of knowledge. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the Lord of
Rimini, might be selected as a true type of the princes who united a
romantic zeal for culture with the vices of barbarians.[1] The coins
which bear the portraits of this man, together with the medallions
carved in red Verona marble on his church at Rimini, show a narrow
forehead, protuberant above bushy eyebrows, a long hooked nose, hollow
cheeks, and petulant, passionate, compressed lips. The whole face seems
ready to flash with sudden violence, to merge its self-control in a
spasm of fury. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta killed three wives in
succession, violated his daughter, and attempted the chastity of his own
son. So much of him belongs to the mere savage. He caused the
magnificent church of S. Francesco at Rimini to be raised by Leo Alberti
in a manner more worthy of a Pagan Pantheon than of a Christian temple.
He incrusted it with exquisite bas-reliefs in marble, the triumphs of
the earliest Renaissance style, carved his own name and ensigns upon
every scroll and frieze and point of vantage in the building, and
dedicated a shrine there to his concubine--_Divae Isottae Sacrum_. So much
of him belongs to the Neo-Pagan of the fifteenth century. He brought
back from Greece the mortal remains of the philosopher Gemistos Plethon,
buried them in a sarcophagus outside his church, and wrote upon the tomb
this epigraph: 'These remains of Gemistus of Byzantium, chief of the
sages of his day, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, son of Pandolfo,
commander in the war against the king of the Turks in the Morea, induced
by the mighty love with which he burns for men of learning, brought
hither and placed within this chest. 1466.' He, the most fretful and
turbulent of men, read books with patient care, and bore the
contradictions of pedants in the course of long discussions on
philosophy and arts and letters. So much of him belonged to the new
spirit of the coming age, in which the zeal for erudition was a passion,
and the spell of science was stronger than the charms of love. At the
same time, as Condottiere, he displayed all the treasons, duplicities,
cruelties, sacr