TO THE IMMORTAL GOD
SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA DI PANDOLFO
(Pray do not pause here—epigraphs, like telegrams, are not punctuated)
PRESERVED FROM MANY OF THE GREATEST PERILS OF THE ITALIAN WAR
ERECTED AND BEQUEATHED MAGNIFICENTLY LAVISH
AS HE HAD VOWED IN THE VERY MIDST OF THE STRUGGLE
AN ILLUSTRIOUS AND HOLY MEMORIAL
No less reflexive was his apotheosis of the frail Isotta, of whom he first made an honest woman and then a goddess. What wonder if his critics carped at the “Disottæ,” the “divine Isotta,” he wrote over her tomb, in lieu of the conventional “Dominæ Isottæ Bonæ Memoriæ”! But one must do the bold, bad condottiere the justice to say that while two angels bear this inscription over her in gold, his own tomb is comparatively modest. It is Isotta whose tomb is supported by shield-bearing elephants and culminates in flourishes as of elephants’ trunks, Isotta who stands over her altar in the guise of a gold-winged angel. Malatesta’s patronage of Giovanni Bellini was not his only contribution to the arts, for a cluster of poets found hospitality at his court and burial at his temple—with a careful inscription that it was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo who buried them—though these seem to have plied the trade of Laureate, if I may judge from the volume published at Paris, “L’Isotteo.” I cannot pretend to be read in Porcellio de’ Pandone or Tommaso Seneca or Basinio of Parma. But Bellini’s tavola suffices to make me say with riddling Samson, “Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness.”
For this is perhaps the teleological purpose of the Magnificent Ones, to play the Mæcenas to some starveling artist or penurious poet. There is in the santuario of the Malatesta temple a fresco of this Sigismondo. He is seen in the flush of youth, gay in a brocaded mantle and red hose, but somewhat disconcertingly on his knees before a crowned figure—his patron saint according to some, the Emperor Sigismondo more probably. Let us call it that sovereign fate to which even megaphonious Magnificence must bow. Almost divine in his lifetime, within a few years the Magnificent One’s character commences to decay, as if that too could not resist the corruption of death. Happy the prince of whom some not malodorous shred of reputation remains a century after his death. The evil that men do lives after them, the good they have not done is oft interred with their bones.
Yes, there is a pathos in the Magnificent Ones. When I consider how their autocosm ensnared them with a sense of their own perdurability, lured them into engaging painters and architects and statuaries to express their triumphant sense of timeless energising, and then ebbed away from them, leaving them putrid carbonates, phosphates, and silicates, while the work of Beauty lived on and lives, having used these momentarily swollen creatures as its channel and tool, then I find it in me to pity these frog-bulls of egotism, so cruelly bemocked and deluded.