SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA AND LEO BATTISTA ALBERTI

Rimini is a city of about 18,000 souls, famous for its Stabilmento de’ Bagni and its antiquities, seated upon the coast of the Adriatic, a little to the south-east of the world-historical Rubicon.  It is our duty to mention the baths first among its claims to distinction, since the prosperity and cheerfulness of the little town depend on them in a great measure.  But visitors from the north will fly from these, to marvel at the bridge which Augustus built and Tiberius completed, and which still spans the Marecchia with five gigantic arches of white Istrian limestone, as solidly as if it had not borne the tramplings of at least three conquests.  The triumphal arch, too, erected in honour of Augustus, is a notable monument of Roman architecture.  Broad, ponderous, substantial, tufted here and there with flowering weeds, and surmounted with mediaeval machicolations, proving it to have sometimes stood for city gate or fortress, it contrasts most favourably with the slight and somewhat gimcrack arch of Trajan in the sister city of Ancona.  Yet these remains of the imperial pontifices, mighty and interesting as they are, sink into comparative insignificance beside the one great wonder of Rimini, the cathedral remodelled for Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta by Leo Battista Alberti in 1450.  This strange church, one of the earliest extant buildings in which the Neopaganism of the Renaissance showed itself in full force, brings together before our memory two men who might be chosen as typical in their contrasted characters of the transitional age which gave them birth.

No one with any tincture of literary knowledge is ignorant of the fame at least of the great Malatesta family - the house of the Wrongheads, as they were rightly called by some prevision of their future part in Lombard history.  The readers of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth cantos of the ‘Inferno’ have all heard of

  E il mastín vecchio e il nuovo da Verucchio
      Che fecer di Montagna il mal governo,

while the story of Francesca da Polenta, who was wedded to the hunchback Giovanni Malatesta and murdered by him with her lover Paolo, is known not merely to students of Dante, but to readers of Byron and Leigh Hunt, to admirers of Flaxman, Ary Scheffer, Dore - to all, in fact, who have of art and letters any love.

The history of these Malatesti, from their first establishment under Otho III. as lieutenants for the Empire in the Marches of Ancona, down to their final subjugation by the Papacy in the age of the Renaissance, is made up of all the vicissitudes which could befall a mediaeval Italian despotism.  Acquiring an unlawful right over the towns of Rimini, Cesena, Sogliano, Ghiacciuolo, they ruled their petty principalities like tyrants by the help of the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, inclining to the one or the other as it suited their humour or their interest, wrangling among themselves, transmitting the succession of their dynasty through bastards and by deeds of force, quarrelling with their neighbours the Counts of Urbino, alternately defying and submitting to the Papal legates in Romagna, serving as condottieri in the wars of the Visconti and the state of Venice, and by their restlessness and genius for military intrigues contributing in no slight measure to the general disturbance of Italy.  The Malatesti were a race of strongly marked character:  more, perhaps, than any other house of Italian tyrants, they combined for generations those qualities of the fox and the lion, which Machiavelli thought indispensable to a successful despot.  Son after son, brother with brother, they continued to be fierce and valiant soldiers, cruel in peace, hardy in war, but treasonable and suspicious in all transactions that could not be settled by the sword.  Want of union, with them as with the Baglioni and many other of the minor noble families in Italy, prevented their founding a substantial dynasty.  Their power, based on force, was maintained by craft and crime, and transmitted through tortuous channels by intrigue.  While false in their dealings with the world at large, they were diabolical in the perfidy with which they treated one another.  No feudal custom, no standard of hereditary right, ruled the succession in their family.  Therefore the ablest Malatesta for the moment clutched what he could of the domains that owned his house for masters.  Partitions among sons or brothers, mutually hostile and suspicious, weakened the whole stock.  Yet they were great enough to hold their own for centuries among the many tyrants who infested Lombardy.  That the other princely families of Romagna, Emilia, and the March were in the same state of internal discord and dismemberment, was probably one reason why the Malatesti stood their ground so firmly as they did.

So far as Rimini is concerned, the house of Malatesta culminated in Sigismondo Pandolfo, son of Gian Galeazzo Visconti’s general, the perfidious Pandolfo.  It was he who built the Rocca, or castle of the despots, which stands a little way outside the town, commanding a fair view of Apennine tossed hill-tops and broad Lombard plain, and who remodelled the Cathedral of S. Francis on a plan suggested by the greatest genius of the age.  Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one of the strangest products of the earlier Renaissance.  To enumerate the crimes which he committed within the sphere of his own family, mysterious and inhuman outrages which render the tale of the Cenci credible, would violate the decencies of literature.  A thoroughly bestial nature gains thus much with posterity that its worst qualities must be passed by in silence.  It is enough to mention that he murdered three wives in succession, Bussoni di Carmagnuola, Guinipera d’Este, and Polissena Sforza, on various pretexts of infidelity, and carved horns upon his own tomb with this fantastic legend underneath: -

  Porto lé corna ch’ ognuno lé vede,
  E tal lé porta che non se lo crede.

He died in wedlock with the beautiful and learned Isotta degli Atti, who had for some time been his mistress.  But, like most of the Malatesti, he left no legitimate offspring.  Throughout his life he was distinguished for bravery and cunning, for endurance of fatigue and rapidity of action, for an almost fretful rashness in the execution of his schemes, and for a character terrible in its violence.  He was acknowledged as a great general; yet nothing succeeded with him.  The long warfare which he carried on against the Duke of Montefeltro ended in his discomfiture.  Having begun by defying the Holy See, he was impeached at Rome for heresy, parricide, incest, adultery, rape, and sacrilege, burned in effigy by Pope Pius II., and finally restored to the bosom of the Church, after suffering the despoliation of almost all his territories, in 1463.  The occasion on which this fierce and turbulent despiser of laws human and divine was forced to kneel as a penitent before the Papal legate in the gorgeous temple dedicated to his own pride, in order that the ban of excommunication might be removed from Rimini, was one of those petty triumphs, interesting chiefly for their picturesqueness, by which the Popes confirmed their questionable rights over the cities of Romagna.  Sigismondo, shorn of his sovereignty, took the command of the Venetian troops against the Turks in the Morea, and returned in 1465, crowned with laurels, to die at Rimini in the scene of his old splendour.

A very characteristic incident belongs to this last act of his life.  Dissolute, treacherous, and inhuman as he was, the tyrant of Rimini had always encouraged literature, and delighted in the society of artists.  He who could brook no contradiction from a prince or soldier, allowed the pedantic scholars of the sixteenth century to dictate to him in matters of taste, and sat with exemplary humility at the feet of Latinists like Porcellio, Basinio, and Trebanio.  Valturio, the engineer, and Alberti, the architect, were his familiar friends; and the best hours of his life were spent in conversation with these men.  Now that he found himself upon the sacred soil of Greece, he was determined not to return to Italy empty-handed.  Should he bring manuscripts or marbles, precious vases or inscriptions in half-legible Greek character?  These relics were greedily sought for by the potentates of Italian cities; and no doubt Sigismondo enriched his library with some such treasures.  But he obtained a nobler prize - nothing less than the body of a saint of scholarship, the authentic bones of the great Platonist, Gemisthus Pletho. These he exhumed from their Greek grave and caused them to be deposited in a stone sarcophagus outside the cathedral of his building in Rimini.  The Venetians, when they stole the body of S. Mark from Alexandria, were scarcely more pleased than was Sigismondo with the acquisition of this Father of the Neopagan faith.  Upon the tomb we still may read this legend:  ’Jemisthii Bizantii philosopher sua temp principis reliquum Sig.  Pan.  Mal.  Pan.  F. belli Pelop adversus Turcor regem Imp ob ingentem eruditorum quo flagrat amorem huc afferendum introque mittendum curavit MCCCCLXVI.’  Of the Latinity of the inscription much cannot be said; but it means that ’Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, having served as general against the Turks in the Morea, induced by the great love with which he burns for all learned men, brought and placed here the remains of Gemisthus of Byzantium, the prince of the philosophers of his day.’

Sigismondo’s portrait, engraved on medals, and sculptured upon every frieze and point of vantage in the Cathedral of Rimini, well denotes the man.  His face is seen in profile.  The head, which is low and flat above the forehead, rising swiftly backward from the crown, carries a thick bushy shock of hair curling at the ends, such as the Italians call a zazzera.  The eye is deeply sunk, with long venomous flat eyelids, like those which Leonardo gives to his most wicked faces.  The nose is long and crooked, curved like a vulture’s over a petulant mouth, with lips deliberately pressed together, as though it were necessary to control some nervous twitching.  The cheek is broad, and its bone is strongly marked.  Looking at these features in repose, we cannot but picture to our fancy what expression they might assume under a sudden fit of fury, when the sinews of the face were contracted with quivering spasms, and the lips writhed in sympathy with knit forehead and wrinkled eyelids.

Allusion has been made to the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini, as the great ornament of the town, and the chief monument of Sigismondo’s fame.  It is here that all the Malatesti lie.  Here too is the chapel consecrated to Isotta, ‘Divae Isottae Sacrum;’ and the tombs of the Malatesta ladies, ‘Malatestorum domus heroidum sepulchrum;’ and Sigismondo’s own grave with the cuckold’s horns and scornful epitaph.  Nothing but the fact that the church is duly dedicated to S. Francis, and that its outer shell of classic marble encases an old Gothic edifice, remains to remind us that it is a Christian place of worship. It has no sanctity, no spirit of piety.  The pride of the tyrant whose legend - ’Sigismundus Pandulphus Malatesta Pan.  F. Fecit Anno Gratiae MCCCCL’ - occupies every arch and stringcourse of the architecture, and whose coat-of-arms and portrait in medallion, with his cipher and his emblems of an elephant and a rose, are wrought in every piece of sculptured work throughout the building, seems so to fill this house of prayer that there is no room left for God.  Yet the Cathedral of Rimini remains a monument of first-rate importance for all students who seek to penetrate the revived Paganism of the fifteenth century.  It serves also to bring a far more interesting Italian of that period than the tyrant of Rimini himself, before our notice.

In the execution of his design, Sigismondo received the assistance of one of the most remarkable men of this or any other age.  Leo Battista Alberti, a scion of the noble Florentine house of that name, born during the exile of his parents, and educated in the Venetian territory, was endowed by nature with aptitudes, faculties, and sensibilities so varied, as to deserve the name of universal genius.  Italy in the Renaissance period was rich in natures of this sort, to whom nothing that is strange or beautiful seemed unfamiliar, and who, gifted with a kind of divination, penetrated the secrets of the world by sympathy.  To Pico della Mirandola, Lionardo da Vinci, and Michel Agnolo Buonarroti may be added Leo Battista Alberti.  That he achieved less than his great compeers, and that he now exists as the shadow of a mighty name, was the effect of circumstances.  He came half a century too early into the world, and worked as a pioneer rather than a settler of the realm which Lionardo ruled as his demesne.  Very early in his boyhood Alberti showed the versatility of his talents.  The use of arms, the management of horses, music, painting, modelling for sculpture, mathematics, classical and modern literature, physical science as then comprehended, and all the bodily exercises proper to the estate of a young nobleman, were at his command.  His biographer asserts that he was never idle, never subject to ennui or fatigue.  He used to say that books at times gave him the same pleasure as brilliant jewels or perfumed flowers:  hunger and sleep could not keep him from them then.  At other times the letters on the page appeared to him like twining and contorted scorpions, so that he preferred to gaze on anything but written scrolls.  He would then turn to music or painting, or to the physical sports in which he excelled.  The language in which this alternation of passion and disgust for study is expressed, bears on it the stamp of Alberti’s peculiar temperament, his fervid and imaginative genius, instinct with subtle sympathies and strange répugnances.  Flying from his study, he would then betake himself to the open air.  No one surpassed him in running, in wrestling, in the force with which he cast his javelin or discharged his arrows.  So sure was his aim and so skilful his cast, that he could fling a farthing from the pavement of the square, and make it ring against a church roof far above.  When he chose to jump, he put his feet together and bounded over the shoulders of men standing erect upon the ground.  On horseback he maintained perfect equilibrium, and seemed incapable of fatigue.  The most restive and vicious animals trembled under him and became like lambs.  There was a kind of magnetism in the man.  We read, besides these feats of strength and skill, that he took pleasure in climbing mountains, for no other purpose apparently than for the joy of being close to nature.

In this, as in many other of his instincts, Alberti was before his age.  To care for the beauties of landscape unadorned by art, and to sympathise with sublime or rugged scenery, was not in the spirit of the Renaissance.  Humanity occupied the attention of poets and painters; and the age was yet far distant when the pantheistic feeling for the world should produce the art of Wordsworth and of Turner.  Yet a few great natures even then began to comprehend the charm and mystery which the Greeks had imaged in their Pan, the sense of an all-pervasive spirit in wild places, the feeling of a hidden want, the invisible tie which makes man a part of rocks and woods and streams around him.  Petrarch had already ascended the summit of Mont Ventoux, to meditate, with an exaltation of the soul he scarcely understood, upon the scene spread at his feet and above his head.  AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini delighted in wild places for no mere pleasure of the chase, but for the joy he took in communing with nature.  How S. Francis found God in the sun and the air, the water and the stars, we know by his celebrated hymn; and of Dante’s acute observation, every canto of the ‘Divine Comedy’ is witness.

Leo Alberti was touched in spirit by even a deeper and a stranger pathos than any of these men:  ’In the early spring, when he beheld the meadows and hills covered with flowers, and saw the trees and plants of all kinds bearing promise of fruit, his heart became exceeding sorrowful; and when in autumn he looked on fields heavy with harvest and orchards apple-laden, he felt such grief that many even saw him weep for the sadness of his soul.’  It would seem that he scarcely understood the source of this sweet trouble:  for at such times he compared the sloth and inutility of men with the industry and fertility of nature; as though this were the secret of his melancholy.  A poet of our century has noted the same stirring of the spirit, and has striven to account for it: -

  Tears from the depth of some divine despair
  Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
  In looking on the happy autumn fields,
  And thinking of the days that are no more.

Both Alberti and Tennyson have connected the mal du pays of the human soul for that ancient country of its birth, the mild Saturnian earth from which we sprang, with a sense of loss.  It is the waste of human energy that affects Alberti; the waste of human life touches the modern poet.  Yet both perhaps have scarcely interpreted their own spirit; for is not the true source of tears deeper and more secret?  Man is a child of nature in the simplest sense; and the stirrings of the secular breasts that gave him suck, and on which he even now must hang, have potent influences over his emotions.

Of Alberti’s extraordinary sensitiveness to all such impressions many curious tales are told.  The sight of refulgent jewels, of flowers, and of fair landscapes, had the same effect upon his nerves as the sound of the Dorian mood upon the youths whom Pythagoras cured of passion by music.  He found in them an anodyne for pain, a restoration from sickness.  Like Walt Whitman, who adheres to nature by closer and more vital sympathy than any other poet of the modern world, Alberti felt the charm of excellent old age no less than that of florid youth.  ’On old men gifted with a noble presence and hale and vigorous, he gazed again and again, and said that he revered in them the delights of nature (naturae delitias).’  Beasts and birds and all living creatures moved him to admiration for the grace with which they had been gifted, each in his own kind.  It is even said that he composed a funeral oration for a dog which he had loved and which died.

To this sensibility for all fair things in nature, Alberti added the charm of a singularly sweet temper and graceful conversation.  The activity of his mind, which was always being exercised on subjects of grave speculation, removed him from the noise and bustle of commonplace society.  He was somewhat silent, inclined to solitude, and of a pensive countenance; yet no man found him difficult of access:  his courtesy was exquisite, and among familiar friends he was noted for the flashes of a delicate and subtle wit.  Collections were made of his apophthegms by friends, and some are recorded by his anonymous biographer. Their finer perfume, as almost always happens with good sayings which do not certain the full pith of a proverb, but owe their force, in part at least, to the personality of their author, and to the happy moment of their production, has evanesced.  Here, however, is one which seems still to bear the impress of Alberti’s genius:  ’Gold is the soul of labour, and labour the slave of pleasure.’  Of women he used to say that their inconstancy was an antidote to their falseness; for if a woman could but persevere in what she undertook, all the fair works of men would be ruined.  One of his strongest moral sentences is aimed at envy, from which he suffered much in his own life, and against which he guarded with a curious amount of caution.  His own family grudged the distinction which his talents gained for him, and a dark story is told of a secret attempt made by them to assassinate him through his servants.  Alberti met these ignoble jealousies with a stately calm and a sweet dignity of demeanour, never condescending to accuse his relatives, never seeking to retaliate, but acting always for the honour of his illustrious house.  In the same spirit of generosity he refused to enter into wordy warfare with detractors and calumniators, sparing the reputation even of his worst enemy when chance had placed him in his power.  This moderation both of speech and conduct was especially distinguished in an age which tolerated the fierce invectives of Filelfo, and applauded the vindictive courage of Cellini.  To money Alberti showed a calm indifference.  He committed his property to his friends and shared with them in common.  Nor was he less careless about vulgar fame, spending far more pains in the invention of machinery and the discovery of laws, than in their publication to the world.  His service was to knowledge, not to glory.  Self-control was another of his eminent qualities.  With the natural impetuosity of a large heart, and the vivacity of a trained athlete, he yet never allowed himself to be subdued by anger or by sensual impulses, but took pains to preserve his character unstained and dignified before the eyes of men.  A story is told of him which may remind us of Goethe’s determination to overcome his giddiness.  In his youth his head was singularly sensitive to changes of temperature; but by gradual habituation he brought himself at last to endure the extremes of heat and cold bareheaded.  In like manner he had a constitutional disgust for onions and honey; so powerful, that the very sight of these things made him sick.  Yet by constantly viewing and touching what was disagreeable, he conquered these dislikes; and proved that men have a complete mastery over what is merely instinctive in their nature.  His courage corresponded to his splendid physical development.  When a boy of fifteen, he severely wounded himself in the foot.  The gash had to be probed and then sewn up.  Alberti not only bore the pain of this operation without a groan, but helped the surgeon with his own hands; and effected a cure of the fever which succeeded by the solace of singing to his cithern.  For music he had a genius of the rarest order; and in painting he is said to have achieved success.  Nothing, however, remains of his work and from what Vasari says of it, we may fairly conclude that he gave less care to the execution of finished pictures, than to drawings subsidiary to architectural and mechanical designs.  His biographer relates that when he had completed a painting, he called children and asked them what it meant.  If they did not know, he reckoned it a failure.  He was also in the habit of painting from memory.  While at Venice, he put on canvas the faces of friends at Florence whom he had not seen for months.  That the art of painting was subservient in his estimation to mechanics, is indicated by what we hear about the camera, in which he showed landscapes by day and the revolutions of the stars by night, so lively drawn that the spectators were affected with amazement.  The semi-scientific impulse to extend man’s mastery over nature, the magician’s desire to penetrate secrets, which so powerfully influenced the development of Lionardo’s genius, seems to have overcome the purely aesthetic instincts of Alberti, so that he became in the end neither a great artist like Raphael, nor a great discoverer like Galileo, but rather a clairvoyant to whom the miracles of nature and of art lie open.

After the first period of youth was over, Leo Battista Alberti devoted his great faculties and all his wealth of genius to the study of the law - then, as now, the quicksand of the noblest natures.  The industry with which he applied himself to the civil and ecclesiastical codes broke his health.  For recreation he composed a Latin comedy called ‘Philodoxeos,’ which imposed upon the judgment of scholars, and was ascribed as a genuine antique to Lepidus, the comic poet.  Feeling stronger, Alberti returned at the age of twenty to his law studies, and pursued them in the teeth of disadvantages.  His health was still uncertain, and the fortune of an exile reduced him to the utmost want.  It was no wonder that under these untoward circumstances even his Herculean strength gave way.  Emaciated and exhausted, he lost the clearness of his eyesight, and became subject to arterial disturbances, which filled his ears with painful sounds.  This nervous illness is not dissimilar to that which Rousseau describes in the confessions of his youth.  In vain, however, his physicians warned Alberti of impending peril.  A man of so much stanchness, accustomed to control his nature with an iron will, is not ready to accept advice.  Alberti persevered in his studies, until at last the very seat of intellect was invaded.  His memory began to fail him for names, while he still retained with wonderful accuracy whatever he had seen with his eyes.  It was now impossible to think of law as a profession.  Yet since he could not live without severe mental exercise, he had recourse to studies which tax the verbal memory less than the intuitive faculties of the reason.  Physics and mathematics became his chief resource; and he devoted his energies to literature.  His ‘Treatise on the Family’ may be numbered among the best of those compositions on social and speculative subjects in which the Italians of the Renaissance sought to rival Cicero.  His essays on the arts are mentioned by Vasari with sincere approbation.  Comedies, interludes, orations, dialogues, and poems flowed with abundance from his facile pen.  Some were written in Latin, which he commanded more than fairly; some in the Tuscan tongue, of which owing to the long exile of his family in Lombardy, he is said to have been less a master.  It was owing to this youthful illness, from which apparently his constitution never wholly recovered, that Alberti’s genius was directed to architecture.

Through his friendship with Flavio Biondo, the famous Roman antiquary, Alberti received an introduction to Nicholas V. at the time when this, the first great Pope of the Renaissance, was engaged in rebuilding the palaces and fortifications of Rome.  Nicholas discerned the genius of the man, and employed him as his chief counsellor in all matters of architecture.  When the Pope died, he was able, while reciting his long Latin will upon his deathbed, to boast that he had restored the Holy See to its due dignity, and the Eternal City to the splendour worthy of the seat of Christendom.  The accomplishment of the second part of his work he owed to the genius of Alberti.  After doing thus much for Rome under Thomas of Sarzana, and before beginning to beautify Florence at the instance of the Rucellai family, Alberti entered the service of the Malatesta, and undertook to remodel the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini.  He found it a plain Gothic structure with apse and side chapels.  Such churches are common enough in Italy, where pointed architecture never developed its true character of complexity and richness, but was doomed to the vast vacuity exemplified in S. Petronio of Bologna.  He left it a strange medley of mediaeval and Renaissance work, a symbol of that dissolving scene in the world’s pantomime, when the spirit of classic art, as yet but little comprehended, was encroaching on the early Christian taste.  Perhaps the mixture of styles so startling in S. Francesco ought not to be laid to the charge of Alberti, who had to execute the task of turning a Gothic into a classic building.  All that he could do was to alter the whole exterior of the church, by affixing a screen-work of Roman arches and Corinthian pilasters, so as to hide the old design and yet to leave the main features of the fabric, the windows and doors especially, in statu quo.  With the interior he dealt upon the same general principle, by not disturbing its structure, while he covered every available square inch of surface with decorations alien to the Gothic manner.  Externally, S. Francesco is perhaps the most original and graceful of the many attempts made by Italian builders to fuse the mediaeval and the classic styles.  For Alberti attempted nothing less.  A century elapsed before Palladio, approaching the problem from a different point of view, restored the antique in its purity, and erected in the Palazzo della Ragione of Vicenza an almost unique specimen of resuscitated Roman art.

Internally, the beauty of the church is wholly due to its exquisite wall-ornaments.  These consist for the most part of low reliefs in a soft white stone, many of them thrown out upon a blue ground in the style of Della Robbia.  Allegorical figures designed with the purity of outline we admire in Botticelli, draperies that Burne-Jones might copy, troops of singing boys in the manner of Donatello, great angels traced upon the stone so delicately that they seem to be rather drawn than sculptured, statuettes in niches, personifications of all arts and sciences alternating with half-bestial shapes of satyrs and sea-children: - such are the forms which fill the spaces of the chapel walls, and climb the pilasters, and fret the arches, in such abundance that had the whole church been finished as it was designed, it would have presented one splendid though bizarre effect of incrustation.  Heavy screens of Verona marble, emblazoned in open arabesques with the ciphers of Sigismondo and Isotta, with coats-of-arms, emblems, and medallion portraits, shut the chapels from the nave.  Who produced all this sculpture it is difficult to say.  Some of it is very good:  much is indifferent.  We may hazard the opinion that, besides Bernardo Ciuffagni, of whom Vasari speaks, some pupils of Donatello and Benedetto da Majano worked at it.  The influence of the sculptors of Florence is everywhere perceptible.

Whatever be the merit of these reliefs, there is no doubt that they fairly represent one of the most interesting moments in the history of modern art.  Gothic inspiration had failed; the early Tuscan style of the Pisani had been worked out; Michelangelo was yet far distant, and the abundance of classic models had not overwhelmed originality.  The sculptors of the school of Ghiberti and Donatello, who are represented in this church, were essentially pictorial, preferring low to high relief, and relief in general to detached figures.  Their style, like the style of Boiardo in poetry, of Botticelli in painting, is specific to Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century.  Mediaeval standards of taste were giving way to classical, Christian sentiment to Pagan; yet the imitation of the antique had not been carried so far as to efface the spontaneity of the artist, and enough remained of Christian feeling to tinge the fancy with a grave and sweet romance.  The sculptor had the skill and mastery to express his slightest shade of thought with freedom, spirit, and precision.  Yet his work showed no sign of conventionality, no adherence to prescribed rules.  Every outline, every fold of drapery, every attitude was pregnant, to the artist’s own mind at any rate, with meaning.  In spite of its symbolism, what he wrought was never mechanically figurative, but gifted with the independence of its own beauty, vital with an inbreathed spirit of life.  It was a happy moment, when art had reached consciousness, and the artist had not yet become self-conscious.  The hand and the brain then really worked together for the procreation of new forms of grace, not for the repetition of old models, or for the invention of the strange and startling.  ’Delicate, sweet, and captivating,’ are good adjectives to express the effect produced upon the mind by the contemplation even of the average work of this period.

To study the flowing lines of the great angels traced upon the walls of the Chapel of S. Sigismund in the Cathedral of Rimini, to follow the undulations of their drapery that seems to float, to feel the dignified urbanity of all their gestures, is like listening to one of those clear early Italian compositions for the voice, which surpasses in suavity of tone and grace of movement all that Music in her full-grown vigour has produced.  There is indeed something infinitely charming in the crepuscular moments of the human mind.  Whether it be the rathe loveliness of an art still immature, or the beauty of art upon the wane - whether, in fact, the twilight be of morning or of evening, we find in the masterpieces of such periods a placid calm and chastened pathos, as of a spirit self-withdrawn from vulgar cares, which in the full light of meridian splendour is lacking.  In the Church of S. Francesco at Rimini the tempered clearness of the dawn is just about to broaden into day.