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Updated: May 15, 2025
As a statesman, while he pacified Italy, he saw Byzantium fall into the hands of the barbarians. He was a Pagan in whom there was no guile. His enthusiasm was rather for Apollo and the Muses than for Jesus and the Saints. With a simplicity touching and delightful, he watched Sigismondo Malatesta build his temple at Rimini, and was his friend and loved him well.
"The Bishop of Sion could not have made truth clearer to the sinner than yourself, Signor Sigismondo! Your manner leads me to ask what I have to do with this?" "There has been a murder, Maso, and the murderer is sought. The dead was found near the spot where thou passed the night; I shall not conceal the unhappy suspicions that are so natural."
And when they did not do so, they still had the credit of it; nor was it worse than the sending of emissaries to poison the cisterns of Venice, which was the charge brought against the heirs of Alfonso, King of Naples. From a scoundrel like Sigismondo Malatesta nothing better could be expected than that he should call the Turks into Italy.
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.
Two years later, the next duke, who was already thirty-eight years of age, obtained the hand of Leonora of Aragon, daughter of Ferrante, King of Naples, and sent his brother Sigismondo at the head of a splendid retinue to bring home his royal bride.
The doge, however, seems to have cared nothing about it and Sigismondo sent to Ravenna and to the Abate two hundred gold florins, so that both declared themselves satisfied.
I remember that the green basalt bust of the Capitol has the same anxious forehead, the same troubled and overburdened eyes; but the agony of this fretful mouth, comparable to nothing but the mouth of Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta, and, like that, on the verge of breaking into the spasms of delirium, is quite peculiar to the Albertina bronze.
The bride, arrayed in a white robe sown with pearls and glittering with jewels, was led to the altar by the Duchess of Ferrara and Marchioness of Mantua, supported by the young Don Alfonso, his uncle Sigismondo, and a select retinue of Ferrarese courtiers and ladies.
Men like Sigismondo Malatesta, Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., and Cæsar Borgia might be passed over as exceptions, as monstrous aberrations which cannot affect our judgment of their time and nation; but the general indifference towards their vices shown by their contemporaries and countrymen is a conclusive and terrible proof of the moral chaos of the Renaissance.
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.
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