The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (24 page)

I
N
1461, P
OPE
P
IUS II
called his cardinals and his princes to Rome for an important meeting. They assembled in the Curia, the papal court, to try the soul of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the tyrant of Rimini. Pius laid the accusations before his council.

Sigismondo Malatesta was an illegitimate member of the noble family of the Malatestas, and had a great spirit and a powerful body. He was an eloquent and a skilful captain. He had studied history and had more than an amateur’s knowledge of philosophy. He seemed born to do whatever he put his hand to. But he was so ruled by his passions, and abandoned himself to such an uncontrollable greed for money, that he became a plunderer and a thief to boot. He was so dissolute that he raped his daughters and his sons-in-law. When a boy, he often acted the female partner in shameful loves, and later forced men to act as women. He had no respect for the sanctity of marriage. He raped virgins who had vowed themselves to God as well as Jewesses, killed young girls, and had young boys who rebelled against his will brutally whipped. He committed adultery with many women whose children he had held at baptism, and murdered their husbands. His cruelty was greater than any barbarian’s, and he inflicted fearful tortures on guilty and innocent alike with his own bloody hands. He rarely told the truth, was a master of patience and dissimulation, a traitor and a perjuror who never kept his word . . . When his subjects finally beseeched him to pursue a policy of peace and to have pity on a country that was constantly exposed to pillage for his sake, he replied: “Go. Be of good cheer, for you will never have peace as long as I live.” This was Sigismondo, a restless, sensual man and a tireless warmonger, one of the worst men that have ever lived, or ever will live, the shame of Italy and the disgrace of our generation.

The pope nursed a particular hatred for Malatesta, who had betrayed his hometown of Siena while in its service; but it was not hard for him to find other witnesses and plaintiffs, for the tyrant had plenty of enemies. King Alfonso of Naples had employed Malatesta as a condottiere, a mercenary soldier, only to see his employee switch sides and fight against him. Federico da Montefeltro, the lord of Urbino, was an old family foe; and Francesco Sforza, himself a rival condottiere, was a new one.

Sforza laid the first charge before the Curia. He had given the hand of his daughter Polissena to Malatesta in 1442, but only three years later Malatesta had taken himself a mistress: the twelve-year-old Isotta degli Atti. Malatesta, then twenty-eight, had glimpsed Isotta through a window, and they fell in love at once. He pursued her with heartfelt verse.

Before you blooms and grass lie down,

Proud to be trod by your sweet foot

And ruffled by your azure robe.

Vain the sun in the early morn,

But when he sees you, overcome

And pale he goes away, in tears.

The obstacles to their love were either removed, or ignored, or taken care of by blind fortune. Isotta’s father soon died, leaving her a large dowry. Malatesta’s wife, Polissena, may have objected, but she also died conveniently quickly, after having put up with her husband’s infatuation for three years. Of course, everyone—including her father—believed that she had been murdered by her husband.

But Pope Pius’s princes (and many of his prelates) had all taken mistresses. They had all spawned bastards, betrayed their superiors, and indulged in family feuds. They all knew that these charges alone could not condemn the soul of Sigismondo Malatesta. So the pope laid another charge before the Curia that, he hoped, would seal the fate of his enemy. It was presented in the form of a medal: a small bronze disk whose face bore Malatesta’s profile. Its obverse depicted a domed building under an inscription containing the words
Praecl. Arimini Templum
(the Famous Temple of Rimini).

The most heinous accusation against Sigismondo Malatesta was architectural. He had, it was alleged, built himself a blasphemous temple, “so full of pagan images that it seems like a temple for the worshippers of demons, not for Christians.” What’s more, this temple had once been a church. The poor brothers of Saint Francis were able to testify to that.

Once upon a time, Malatesta’s ancestor Verruchio had allowed the Franciscan friars to build a chapel in Rimini close to the old Roman Forum. This chapel was, in the tradition of the Franciscans, little more than a simple brick box for preaching in. There was one arched door at the western end and a plain room within, covered with a timber roof. When it was complete, Verruchio had Giotto, the house painter of the Franciscans, make an altarpiece at the east end of the church. This altarpiece, painted in a manner as simple and direct as the message of Saint Francis, represented Christ on the Cross. Before him knelt Verruchio himself, in the hope that a drop of the Savior’s blood would fall upon him and wash away his sins. When he died at the grand old age of a hundred, the Old Mastiff, as he was known, was buried in the church of the Franciscans in Rimini; and his descendants all made sure that they were buried there as well, hoping that their souls, too, would be cleansed from sin by association with Saint Francis. It was this simple family shrine that Malatesta had turned into an arrogant blasphemy.

N
EXT BEFORE THE
Curia were laid the depositions of two courtiers of Malatesta, who spoke of his learning and his keen intelligence. Malatesta was a bastard and a soldier of fortune, they submitted; but he had always dreamed of being a real, legitimate prince. In 1433, when he was only fifteen years old, the emperor Sigismund passed through Rimini, and Malatesta persuaded him to confirm him in the lordship of the town, even though this title was not in the emperor’s gift but in the pope’s.

Like the legitimate princes of his time, Malatesta strove to excel not only in the arts of war but in the arts of peace as well: in philosophy and literature, mathematics and music, astrology and history. In attendance on the pope at the consecration of Florence Cathedral in
1436, Malatesta would have had the opportunity to meet some of the most learned men of his day. These scholars were avid collectors of ancient texts, but they also constructed new ones. They wrote histories in the manner of Livy; bawdy tales and satires like Petronius; and invectives, panegyrics, philippics, georgics, and orations in the purest Latin of Cicero, reviving the language from centuries of ecclesiastical torpor. One of them became Malatesta’s tutor, instructing him in the literature of ancient Rome.

In the following year, the papal court met the emperor of Constantinople, who sought Western aid as the armies of Islam closed in around him. While the learned men of Italy represented the apogee of Latin learning, the Byzantine embassy carried with them the wisdom of the Greeks. Among them was Gemistos Plethon, a poet and philosopher who lived in the hills above ancient Sparta. Plethon was a man of radical ideas. He had been declared a heretic for his
De Differentiis
, which compared the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of God; and he proposed, in his
Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato
, a return to the paganism of his ancestors. On his way home from the council, Plethon stopped awhile in Rimini to converse with its youthful and inquisitive ruler. Then he boarded his ship and sailed back to the Byzantine Empire, which would be extinguished fifteen years later. The two men did not see each other alive again.

Malatesta, inspired by his meeting with Plethon and keen to appear as cultured as the aristocrats who paid him to fight for them, started to collect for himself a court of humanists. He summoned Basinio Basini of Parma to act as his astrologer; and Basini took the Latin name Basinius and composed
Hesperis
, an epic that mythologized the achievements of his master as if they were those of an Achilles in courage, an Augustus in majesty, and a Plato in wisdom. Basinius even turned the illegitimate love of Malatesta and Isotta into a cycle of poems named the
Liber Isottaeus
. Malatesta also poached Roberto Valturio from the court of Pope Eugenius IV, and Valturio wrote a Latin treatise on the art of warfare for his new master. So proud was the condottiere of this treatise that he sent handwritten copies of it to everyone from Lorenzo the Magnificent to the king of Hungary.

O
NE OF THESE
copies of
De Militaria
, the papal Curia was told, had just been found in the Venetian colony of Candia in the possession of a certain Matteo de’ Pasti. This man, it was scandalously revealed, had been charged by Malatesta with the task of taking it to the sultan of Constantinople; but de’ Pasti’s role in the crimes of his master was much more significant than that of go-between to the infidel enemy. Now his deposition, too, was laid before the princes and the prelates of the Curia.

At a dinner in the gardens of Maecenas in Rome, Malatesta had once admired the prince of Ferrara’s antique habit of issuing medals bearing his image. De’ Pasti was a medal maker, among his other talents, and in 1446, Malatesta lured him to Rimini for a similar series of commissions. De’ Pasti cast a series of medals that bore the profile of Sigismondo Malatesta on one side and various emblems on the other, lauding the princeling’s noble qualities. There was one of Fortitude (for Malatesta was, after all, a soldier) holding a broken column and sitting on a pair of elephants, which were the emblem of the Malatesta family. On another medal the elephant was alone, trampling the enemies of Malatesta and trumpeting his fame, and on a third there was a suit of knightly armor. De’ Pasti also illuminated the manuscripts of
Hesperis
and De Militaria with images of the tyrant and his works, presented as if they were inscriptions and reliefs taken from antiquity. For his labors he was made the chief artificer of the court of Rimini, honored with the sobriquet
noble
.

But Malatesta was not content to play with treatises and medals and emblems. With the proceeds of his military successes he started to transform the Rimini he had inherited into the Rimini he desired it to be. He built himself a magnificent fortress, the Castel Sismondo, in which he could live like the real prince he aspired to be; and then he turned his attention to the church of Saint Francis, where the bones of his ancestors were laid, and began to consider how he might be remembered when he joined them. In 1447, Sigismondo Malatesta laid the foundation stone of a new chapel on the southern side of this church, dedicated to the Saint Sigismund from whom
Malatesta took his name. When it was finished, Malatesta commissioned the painter Piero della Francesca to decorate the interior of the new addition.

It was a modest commission, only the painting of a wall, and Piero produced what was, on the face of it, a conventional sort of painting. It showed the Sigismondo of flesh and blood kneeling before his sainted counterpart, just as his ancestor Verruchio knelt before the crucified Christ in Giotto’s altarpiece. But the similarity between the two paintings ended there. It was usual to place the saint in the center of such an image, and the donor to one side, as if to emphasize that the saint was closer to the heart of creation than the mere mortal who adored him; but it is Malatesta’s eye that occupies the dead center of Piero’s’s image. Depicted in profile, like an emperor on a coin, Malatesta kneels in front of a wall, framed by a pair of Corinthian pilasters that are rendered with the closest attention to the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of classical architecture.