The Ugly Renaissance (38 page)

The changing character of fifteenth-century warfare had produced a generation of unusually determined and dangerous condottieri. With large, highly trained, and well-equipped armies at their disposal, they had not only become invaluable to the conduct of war but had also emerged as disproportionately important players on the political scene. These same developments had exacerbated the darker side of the mercenary generals’ personalities. They possessed titles and land in abundance, which spurred their ambitious and acquisitive natures to new extremes. The greater the prizes were, the more violent and ruthless they became. At best, they were supercharged bandits, plundering, cheating, and extorting at will, and, at worst, they were cruel tyrants, given to conspiracies, poisoning, and murder.

There were, however, limits to how far most condottieri could go. Federico da Montefeltro and his ilk may have been uncompromising and savage, but they were businessmen first and foremost. They knew that too much wanton slaughter was bad for business, and while they could take advantage of Italy’s fractious political condition to a certain extent, there was only so much that the other players would accept. There was, in other words, a brake holding back the mercenary juggernaut.

It was, after all, because mercenary generals knew they couldn’t hope to live, thrive, and survive as murderous psychopaths that they sought to project an image of ancient valor, Christian virtue, and cultured refinement. And it was because the cities knew they had to find some way of working with these most dangerous of men that they occasionally hailed them as heroes, as a matter of artistic realpolitik.

This arrangement hinged on the condottieri’s willingness to respect the balance of political power and to employ a measure of sound judgment. Restraint and, by extension, familiar patterns of patronage depended on their being held in check by more powerful political actors,
and on their keeping a good grip on their sanity. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, however, was a law unto himself.

Fighting was in Sigismondo’s blood: he came from a long line of condottieri. Although they could trace their origins as far back as the eighth century, his family had first risen to prominence in 1239, when his great-great-grandfather
Malatesta da Verucchio had become podestà of
Rimini. Since that moment the family’s fortunes had relied exclusively on their peculiar brilliance as mercenary generals. War became the family’s profession. They were all brave, resourceful, and ambitious and, by dint of a careful program of territorial acquisition, had managed to gain a secure hold of Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Cesena, Fossombrone, and Cervia by the time Sigismondo was born in 1417.

Although highly respected as commanders, the Malatesta were no strangers to the violence and cruelty that tended to characterize Renaissance condottieri. Dante’s account of
Giovanni Malatesta’s murder of his wife and brother in 1285 has already been mentioned, but it would be wrong to assume that this was anything out of the ordinary. Being a member of the
Malatesta family was like living in a cross between a soap opera and
The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. Malatesta II Malatesta (1299–1364) was known as Guastafamiglia (the family destroyer) for a very good reason. He locked up and deposed his cousin Ferrantino; he imprisoned and murdered Ferrantino’s son, Malatestino Novello; and just to be sure, he even had Ferrantino’s grandson Guido consigned to the same fate. Before he died, however, Malatestino Novello (d. 1335) had killed his uncle Ramberto, who had himself slaughtered his cousin Uberto.

The illegitimate son of the crusading
capitano generale
of the Venetian army,
Pandolfo III Malatesta, Sigismondo was initiated into the arts of war from an early age. He took up arms for the first time when he was only thirteen and showed his precocious brilliance by leading a successful defense of Rimini against his kinsman Carlo II Malatesta before assuming the lordship of the city two years later. Swiftly launching himself into a career as a professional condottiere, he was rapidly recognized as the most outstanding member of an already remarkable family of mercenary generals. Throughout the 1430s, the young man augmented his growing reputation by waging a series of campaigns in the service of the papacy and Francesco Sforza, and even though there
were a few minor slips here and there (such as his rather foolhardy seizure of papal Cervia), he looked set for a dazzling career.

Even in his youth, however, there were signs that military brilliance was not all that Sigismondo had inherited from his warlike forebears. The
viciousness of the Malatesta had had a rather worrying effect on his state of mind. Although it is easy to dismiss Pius II’s accusations of incest and murder as hyperbole, the pope’s claims were grounded in fact. Still in his teens, Sigismondo married his own niece Ginevra d’Este in 1434, and while few doubted either her beauty or the brilliance of the match, the choice of so close a relative for his bride was greeted with surprise. By 1440, the twenty-one-year-old Ginevra was dead, leading to speculation that Sigismondo, having grown bored, had had her poisoned. It set the tone for what was to follow. His second wife,
Polissena Sforza—the illegitimate daughter of Francesco—fared no better. After seven years of marriage, she, too, died in mysterious circumstances in 1449, not long
after Sigismondo had begun an affair with the twelve-year-old
Isotta degli Atti. It might all have been a coincidence, but it looked as if Sigismondo’s temper were ruled not by good sense but by compulsive randiness and supremely reckless egotism.

Instability in Sigismondo’s private life was matched by a growing intemperance in military affairs. While his brilliance as a commander was undiminished, it became clear he was hotheaded, untrustworthy, and totally self-obsessed.

In part, this was a consequence of his brazen, even arrogant, efforts at territorial acquisition. Longing to dominate the Romagna, Sigismondo set his sights on
Urbino, of which
Oddantonio da Montefeltro had become count in 1443. Taking advantage of the fifteen-year-old Oddantonio’s political inexperience and limited financial resources, Sigismondo managed to persuade the naive adolescent not only that he was a true friend but also that he would protect Urbino from its Milanese enemies. It was obvious that Sigismondo was planning to make Oddantonio totally dependent on him before annexing Urbino for himself. It was a classic condottiere plot. But Sigismondo was simply too impulsive and overconfident to carry it off discreetly. He made almost no effort to conceal his scheme, and Federico da Montefeltro, Oddantonio’s elder half brother, who had his own plans for Urbino, soon found out he was in danger of being beaten to the prize. In the wake of Oddantonio’s suspiciously convenient assassination the following year, Federico wasted no time in seizing control of the city and foiling Sigismondo’s plan. As a consequence, the Wolf had not merely lost Urbino but had also made an implacable enemy out of Federico da Montefeltro, a man with whom few would ever pick a fight.
Over the next fourteen years, the two condottieri would engage in a series of bitterly fought campaigns against each other that did much to destabilize the political situation in Romagna and the Marche.

In part, however, Sigismondo’s capacity for making enemies was simply the result of his being the most treacherous condottiere of the entire Renaissance. He seemed almost to enjoy betraying people simply for the fun of it, as if war itself were not entertainment enough for his perversely sadomasochistic approach to politics. As Pius II succinctly put it:

He broke faith with King Alfons
o of Sicily and his son Ferrante; with Francesco, duke of Milan; and with the Venetians, the Florentines and the Sienese. Repeatedly he deceived the Church of Rome. Finally, when there was no one left in Italy for him to betray, he went over to the French who, out of hatred of Pope Pius, pursued an alliance with him; but they fared no better than the other princes. Once, when asked by his subjects if he would not at last retire to a peaceful life and thereby give some relief to the country which he had so often subjected to war, he replied, “Be off, and don’t lose your nerve! As long as I’m alive you’ll never have peace!”

Though he may have laughed with characteristic cockiness at wrong-footing his employers, Sigismondo had alienated every one of Italy’s major powers and had turned some of the greatest condottieri of the age into his bitterest foes. But so great was his sense of self-importance that even this didn’t seem to trouble him. The one opportunity he had to correct some of his errors—in Florence, in April 1459—was squandered, apparently just for the fun of it. Pius II’s attempts to repair Sigismondo’s relations with Alfonso of Aragon were contemptuously rejected, and abuse was heaped on all concerned. And when peace was finally established in northern Italy in 1454, he didn’t seem to care that he was
deliberately excluded from the terms of the Peace of Lodi. He seemed determined to be the scourge of all and the friend to none.

Sigismondo’s behavior only got worse, and he seemed to delight in his outrages more with each passing day. Only a few years later, Pius II claimed that he

was a slave to avarice, prepared not only to plunder but to steal, so unbridled in his lust that he violated both his daughters and his sons-in-law. As a boy, he often played the bride; later, he who had so often taken the woman’s part used other men like whores. No marriage was sacred to him. He raped Christian nuns and Jewish ladies alike; boys and girls who resisted him he would either murder or torture in terrible ways. Often, if he stood godfather to a child, he would compel the mother to commit adultery, then have her husband killed. He surpassed every barbarian in cruelty; his bloody hands wreaked dire torments on innocent and guilty alike … He oppressed the poor and plundered the rich; neither widows nor orphans were spared. Under his tyranny no one was safe. A man blessed with wealth or a beautiful wife or handsome children would find himself facing a trumped-up criminal charge. He hated priests and despised religion … Before taking Isotta for his mistress, he had two wives whom he killed in succession, using violence or poison … Once, not far from Verona, he met a noble lady on her way from Germany to Rome for the jubilee; he raped her (for she was very beautiful) and left her there in the road, wounded from her struggles and dripping with blood … Truth was seldom in his mouth. He was a past master of pretense and dissimulation, a perjurer and a cheat.

That Pius II subsequently declared a crusade against him and had his effigy publicly burned in Rome only appears to have added to his entertainment.

At some level, Sigismondo was unhinged. He had absolutely no sense of restraint and pushed the already excessive habits of mercenary generals to extremes. He needed neither rhyme nor reason for his actions; it didn’t matter that his behavior was outrageous, foolhardy, and dangerous. Nothing, he thought, could touch him.

It was, however, precisely because of Sigismondo’s almost insane determination to pursue the worse aspects of the mercenary life further than anyone else had ever done that he was to transform himself into such a pioneering patron of the arts. Undoubtedly one of the most spectacular soldier-patrons of the period, Sigismondo did things his way. Just as he was determined to out-mercenary other mercenaries in war and politics, so he adopted and reconfigured familiar patterns of condottiere patronage to meet his own, rather extreme needs. Like other soldiers of fortune, he was aware that humanistically inspired art could address social and moral questions attendant on mercenary existence and could also play a major part in creating a “court” culture: it was just that he understood these things rather differently from everyone else. Rather than being troubled by a sense of sin, Sigismondo saw violence and war as virtues; rather than being ashamed of fighting for money, he saw himself as a semidivine hero; and rather than being interested in concealing his shocking offenses with a veneer of cultured respectability, he crafted an early version of a personality cult for himself that recognized no fault.

The architecture and decoration of the
Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini are the most revealing illustration of Sigismondo’s idiosyncratic approach to patronage. The building itself is unusually eloquent. Designed by
Leon Battista Alberti, the “temple” was widely regarded as “
one of the foremost churches in Italy” and initially appears to be an edifice “
erected at … magnanimous expense” for the greater glory of God. But it was conceived principally as a shrine to Sigismondo himself. Instead of echoing the architectural devices common to other Italian churches, Sigismondo had Alberti use the triumphal arches of the emperors Constantine and Augustus as his models. Knowing that such arches had only been erected to commemorate a toweringly important victory in battle by a grateful Roman Senate, Sigismondo intended not to present himself as like ancient heroes but to indicate that he was, in fact, the living embodiment of a classical
triumphator
, the possessor of
imperium
, and the heir to the military achievements of the greatest generals in history. He wasn’t making up for a perceived flaw in his choice of career but was actually celebrating his prowess as a condottiere without the least hint of shame. Merely by entering the Tempio Malatestiano, a worshipper was obliged to recognize the triumphal magnificence of his
soldierly genius, and thus to do homage to his status as an ideal, near-mythical commander.

The interior is no less surprising. Quite apart from the imposing tombs Sigismondo erected in his own honor and in memory of his wives,
the fresco he commissioned from
Piero della Francesca in 1451, which was painted on the interior wall of the facade, is of particular note (
Fig. 29
). In this fresco, Sigismondo is depicted kneeling in prayer before the seated figure of
Saint Sigismund and is accompanied by a reclining hound and a stylized image of his eponymous castle. Once again, this work appears to continue themes of devotion and piety found in pieces of art commissioned by other condottieri; but once more, Sigismondo seems to have subverted the normal pattern of doing things in such a way that the fresco’s superficial appearance belies its hidden meaning.