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.
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.