8
TURNING FROM THE portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici, Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s eyes would have fallen on a proud figure on the far left of Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem whom he would have recognized immediately as Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the “Wolf of Rimini.” Riding a tough chestnut steed bred for war, he was every inch the battle-hardened soldier. His chest—puffed out with pride—was broader than any other, his neck was thick as a bull’s, and his handsome jaw was set into a look of hardy resolve. Pointedly hatless, he looked ready for action, positively itching to snatch his sword from its scabbard and have at the enemy. But at the same time, he had a certain panache about him. His clothing was of the highest quality, and his whole bearing radiated a sense of taste and muscular refinement.
Galeazzo Maria would have been compelled to admit that it was a good likeness. He would already have had the opportunity to study Sigismondo at close quarters. Only a few years earlier, the Wolf had sold his services to Duke Francesco of Milan and had often been to the court for councils of war. What was more, Sigismondo had a reputation that preceded him. Not only was he famed as a brave, fearless warrior with an almost unparalleled gift for strategy, but he was also known for his humanistic tastes and had become famous for his patronage of the arts. Indeed, Galeazzo Maria would have found it difficult to disagree with Pope Pius II’s contention that “in both mind and body, he was exceedingly powerful, gifted with eloquence, and great military skill, a profound knowledge of history and more than a passing knowledge of philosophy.” As the pontiff opined, “Whatever he attempted, he seemed born to do.”
But what Gozzoli’s portrait didn’t show—at least not directly—was that there was another, much darker side to the Wolf of Rimini. For all of Sigismondo’s merits, “the evil side of his character had the upper hand.” This, in fact, was something of an understatement. Despite praising him for his courage and learning, Pius II was in no doubt that he was “the worst of all men who have ever lived or ever will live, the shame of Italy, the disgrace of our age.”
Sigismondo’s portrait in Gozzoli’s frescoes presented something of a paradox. On the one hand, here was a man who was famous—or, rather, infamous—for having “no tolerance for peace” and for being “a devotee of pleasure, patient of any hardship, [and] eager for war.” And yet he was evidently a man of culture and refinement. Sigismondo was well-known for his lavish patronage of the arts, and Cosimo de’ Medici—no mean judge of men—thought sufficiently highly of him to include his portrait among the most eminent and learned men of the day.
The paradox went deeper still. Sigismondo was, in many senses, typical of a very particular—but often overlooked—breed of Renaissance patrons, and his portrait was just a tiny snapshot of the world they inhabited. However much Pius II liked to disparage him as the “worst of all men,” Sigismondo was the embodiment of the condottieri of the period, the very archetype of the new mercenary generals who had come to dominate the art of war and who held the fate of Italy in their hands. Violent, brutal, and brilliant men, they raped, pillaged, and murdered their way across the peninsula, earning the disdain of the powerful and casting a shadow of fear wherever they went. Yet, at the same time as their stature and importance grew, they came to play an increasingly important role in the arts, first as the objects of a cult of civic commemoration and later as patrons in their own right. Indeed, they were almost obsessed with the arts. Though their hands were stained with blood, they commissioned paintings, sculptures, churches, and palaces of unparalleled beauty, and their patronage served to elevate artists like Piero della Francesca to the pantheon of European culture.
If Sigismondo’s apparently perplexing appearance in Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem and his bewildering obsession with the arts are to be understood, it’s necessary to look behind his portrait and uncover the strange story of the condottieri’s preoccupation with culture, from its origins in the confused warfare of the early Renaissance to its ultimate and terrifying refinement in the mid-fifteenth century. It’s a tale far removed from familiar conceptions of Renaissance patronage: a drama of war and betrayal in which the stars were little more than hired thugs who teetered constantly on the edge of madness, and who rampaged ruthlessly around Italy with bad attitude and seriously good taste. Indeed, the story is much like a good old shoot-’em-up Western, except that the good aren’t so great, the bad are a lot worse, and the ugly really, really like art.
THE ART OF WAR
The Renaissance was the golden age of mercenaries. From the very beginning of the period, condottieri dominated the political and military life of Italy and had a stranglehold on the states of the peninsula. Although mercenaries had been commonplace since antiquity, their position in Renaissance Italy was without precedence, and they owed their frightening preeminence to the progressive evolution of warfare from the end of the Middle Ages onward.
By the dawn of the fourteenth century, it was clear not only that the anarchically fragmented states of Italy were doomed to exist in a condition of near-perpetual conflict, but also that war itself was becoming more technologically advanced. Although it was painted in the early fifteenth century, Paolo Uccello’s three-part Battle of San Romano (Uffizi, Florence; National Gallery, London; Louvre, Paris) vividly illustrates the growing complexities of warfare (Figs. 23–25). Commemorating a battle between Florence and Siena in 1432, Uccello’s scene is a powerful evocation of the violent chaos of war, and the sheer, bloody confusion of it all almost defies the artist’s desperate attempt to use perspective to introduce a measure of order. But among the vicious disorder of the fighting, Uccello also included representations of two of the most important technological developments in early Renaissance warfare in the background to the first two panels (Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano; Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino Unseats Bernardino della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano). Here, in the fields, a number of armored men are either drawing or firing crossbows (balestieri), and it was the crossbow that was the key to everything. Along with the longbow, it had transformed the whole nature of armed conflict. With a greater range, impact, and accuracy than anything seen before, the crossbow and the longbow were far superior to the bows and arrows of the Middle Ages, and—as the Battle of Agincourt was to show—could lead to whole-scale slaughter if properly used.
This had serious implications for the way armies fought. Most obviously, it changed the nature of armor. The crossbow and the longbow rendered the chain-mail armor previously favored by infantrymen and knights almost useless, and demanded the introduction of heavier plate armor and—in some cases—protection for horses. It is for this reason that in Uccello’s scenes all of the cavalrymen wear complete suits of armor and even the infantrymen in the background are shown wearing metal cuirasses. These technological shifts also changed the way the all-important cavalry fought. At risk from being shot by crossbow bolts or longbowmen (note the toppled horse in the second of Uccello’s panels), knights could no longer expect to function alone: they needed a horse or two in reserve and a team of supporting infantry to provide suppressing fire and additional protection. The fighting unit of a knight and two or three foot soldiers became known as a lance.
These technological changes made warfare a more professional affair. Crossbows and longbows required a good deal of practice if they were to be used properly, while a lance needed to train together for some time to be fully effective. What was more, plate armor, replacement horses, and even crossbows were expensive, highly specialized items. This posed something of a problem. Even the wealthiest citizens could not be expected to possess such equipment or expertise as a matter of course, and the growing ferocity of the Italian arms race made it impractical for any state to pin its hopes on the meager capabilities of a homegrown volunteer force. Compelled to fight ever-longer and more demanding campaigns, Italian city-states and signori were obliged to look elsewhere. If they were to have any success in war, they needed to be able to employ complete units of fully equipped, well-drilled professionals and had to be prepared to use some of their newfound wealth in arming themselves as well as they could. Mercenaries were the only solution. From around 1300, “professional mercenaries” hired in large companies “replaced largely native troops as the main components of Italian armies,” while their leaders—the earliest condottieri—replaced indigenous generals as the strategic masterminds of each campaigning season. In fact, the three commanders depicted in The Battle of San Romano—Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino, Micheletto Attendolo, and Bernardino Ubaldini della Carda—were all condottieri.
During the fourteenth century, the immediate need for sizable numbers of highly skilled mercenaries was met by the sudden and rather unexpected influx of foreign soldiers into Italy. They came to Italy from all over the continent and by a variety of different routes. Some, especially Germans and Englishmen like Sir John Hawkwood, were looking for employment after serving in campaigns elsewhere in Europe. Others, mostly Hungarians, Frenchmen, and Catalans, had originally come to the peninsula on invasions launched by foreign rulers such as Louis the Great of Hungary and the Avignon popes, and had stayed behind in the hope of earning a living from their fighting skills. The “foreignness” of these companies was, from the very beginning, a distinct advantage. Nonnatives were unlikely to take sides on “ideological” grounds and hence could be swayed by cash, and at the same time they allowed Italian states access to the very latest military technology (crossbows, longbows, and so on), the masters of which were, by common consent, largely from northern Europe.
The earliest known companies—such as those led by William della Torre and the deliciously named Diego de Rat—were comparatively small, numbering anywhere between nineteen and eight hundred men, and appear to have had a relatively loose structure. By the third decade of the fourteenth century, they had grown to be fairly sizable, well-organized units with a defined identity and leadership structure, and some—like the Company of Siena or the Company of the Cerruglio—are known to have comprised troops from a number of different nationalities. Some were fairly specialized units, being devoted exclusively to infantry or cavalry, but many were composite bands that addressed all military needs simultaneously. The largest, the Great Company (led by Werner of Urslingen and later by Fra Moriale), Sir John Hawkwood’s White Company, and the Company of the Star, could comprise as many as ten thousand soldiers and twenty thousand camp followers.
Most cities and signori employed condottieri and their companies on the basis of short-term contracts (condotte, from which condottieri derived their name), normally lasting between four and eight months. The duration of these contracts probably reflects a certain wariness of bearing the cost of mercenaries for longer than was absolutely necessary. But this did not mean that mercenary companies were here-today-and-gone-tomorrow bands. Although they did flit between employers as the whim took them, the majority had their contracts reissued time after time. The German captain Hermann Vesternich, for example, was kept on the Florentine payroll for nearly twenty years (1353–71, 1380) on the basis of rolling four-month contracts. At the same time, some truly outstanding condottieri could be given longer contracts that would be renewed numerous times over much longer periods. Along with his fellow Englishmen John Berwick and Johnny Liverpool, Hawkwood was contracted for a year at a time, on the tacit understanding that his contract would be continued almost indefinitely. By the same token, the short duration of such contracts did not mean they were financially unrewarding. Quite the reverse. Highly valued for their skills, Englishmen, in particular, could command enormous salaries, sometimes far in excess of the monetary rewards given to a state’s highest officials.
Once employed, foreign condottieri often proved themselves both effective and loyal. Given that they were campaigning far from home and had no immediate ties to Italy itself, there was little danger of their wanting either to become too embroiled in the complex politics of the faction-torn peninsula or to carve out territorial states for themselves. By the same token, those companies headed by Italians exiled from their native cities were normally happy to stay aloof from the dirty world of politics inhabited by their masters. War was their business, pure and simple, and as long as the cash kept rolling, they would keep fighting.
THE GOOD: THE FOREIGN CONDOTTIERI AND MERCENARY MONUMENTS
That the states of northern Italy had reason to be extremely thankful for the unexpected arrival of these early, foreign condottieri can readily be seen in Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. It was here, in 1436, that the Florentine Signoria commissioned Paolo Uccello to paint a large funeral monument to one of the city’s most respected public servants (Fig. 26). “A beautiful work of extraordinary grandeur,” it was a remarkable—even overpowering—statement of the commune’s esteem, and although moved on a number of occasions, it was designed to be seen by anyone who came to worship. It was unusual, to say the least. Although the Duomo was the epicenter of civic and religious life, it was normally seen as being “above” such things. For anyone to be commemorated in such a manner was a high honor indeed, but for a foreigner—and a “barbaric” Englishman who earned his bread by renting out his sword—to be marked in such a way was almost beyond belief.
Then again, Sir John Hawkwood was no ordinary man. A condottiere of the highest order, he was known as one of the foremost soldiers of the day. As the inscription beneath Uccello’s equestrian portrait explains, this “British knight” was the “most prudent leader of his age, and most expert in military matters.” Born somewhere in southeast England, he had served in France under Edward III during the Hundred Years’ War and, following a brief cessation in hostilities, set himself up as a mercenary captain in Burgundy in around 1360. It was while campaigning with the White Company against the papacy in Avignon, however, that he first came to the notice of the Italian states. Respected for his courage and leadership, he was invited to take up arms in Italy for the first time in 1362. Over the next few years, he campaigned tirelessly throughout the North of the peninsula for various employers, but it was in 1377 that he found his métier after being persuaded to take up arms for Florence at the height of the War of the Eight Saints (which Florence and its allies waged against the papacy between 1375 and 1378). For the next seventeen years, Hawkwood would serve almost continuously as the city’s “most effective captain and the most accomplished soldier in all of Italy.” Leading the Florentine forces in the war against Milan, he earned a reputation both as the “savior” of the city’s liberty and as the most loyal of its mercenary commanders. So great was its gratitude that he was granted citizenship and a handsome pension, and on his death in 1394 he was honored with a state funeral. Though belated, Uccello’s magnificent funerary monument was just one more testament to the tremendous esteem in which he was held by the city of Florence.
Although he was undoubtedly an outstanding example of the foreign mercenary general, Hawkwood’s equestrian portrait was emblematic of the manner in which art could be used to celebrate and extol such figures. Lacking either permanent abodes or territorial interests, early condottieri like Hawkwood were naturally somewhat removed from the ordinary practice of artistic patronage, but they were held in such high regard that states often hired artists to give visual expression to their gratitude. Even more impressive than Hawkwood’s own monument, for example, was the fresco of Guidoriccio da Fogliano at the Siege of Montemassi, once thought to have been painted by Simone Martini for the Sala del Mappamondo in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in around 1330.
But while Uccello’s equestrian portrait of Hawkwood was a heartfelt expression of esteem, it also testified to a different dimension of the early condottieri’s habits. For all of their many laudable characteristics, the early condottieri weren’t paragons of virtue. In fact, they weren’t very decent people at all, and especially not the gallant English knight depicted by Uccello.
Hawkwood’s much-vaunted reputation for loyalty perhaps gives a false impression of the fidelity of the early condottieri. Neither foreign mercenaries nor Italian exiles seem to have lusted after territorial aggrandizement, but they were passionately addicted to cash.
While wars were raging, mercenary generals had absolutely no hesitation in switching sides if the price was right. This was precisely how Hawkwood first came into Florentine service in 1377. Two years into the War of the Eight Saints, Pope Gregory XI had made peace with Florence’s most important ally, Milan. Having thus shattered the antipapal alliance, Gregory, it was widely expected, would attempt to bring the conflict to a swift end by sending Hawkwood—then one of his most senior commanders—on a campaign against Florence itself. To avoid such a devastating eventuality, Florence offered Hawkwood a bribe of 130,000 florins to come over to its side. Recognizing the dangers of such treachery, communes and signori were soon willing to pay insanely high salaries to the better condottieri in times of peace and war not only to make it worth the mercenaries’ while to stay loyal but also to price their enemies out of the market.
Even during peacetime, however, the early condottieri felt no compunctions about using their monopoly on violence to get what they wanted. In practice, this meant nothing more nor less than heavily armed extortion, and once again Hawkwood was the acknowledged master. In 1379, Florence was at peace, and hence had no need to employ a large number of mercenaries. Yet by leading a band of marauders through the Tuscan countryside and threatening to wreak havoc on the inhabitants, Hawkwood gave Florence no choice but to keep him and one thousand lances on the payroll and hand over a hefty sum of money into the bargain. In part, high salaries can also be understood as ongoing bribes to ensure good behavior.
Mercenaries and their commanders were violent, unpleasant human beings inured to war and accustomed to violence. Even among the “better” condottieri, savagery was a way of life. Their campaigns were often waged with a brutality that went far beyond any strategic justification. While praising the thirteenth-century condottiere Farinata degli Uberti (d. 1264), for example, Leonardo Bruni was compelled to admit that even so outstanding a general “behaved more unforgivingly towards his adversaries than is consistent with the moderation of civilized conduct.” Just how unforgivingly can be gauged from Hawkwood’s actions in the next century. In 1377, Hawkwood was responsible for butchering the entire population of Cesena and presided over the massacre of some five thousand civilians. It was the awareness of this fact that underpinned the many attacks on condottieri in contemporary literature. Lamenting the use of German mercenaries during the siege of Parma in 1344–45, Petrarch not only bemoaned the “venal hearts” of the foreign soldiers who could so easily turn from “followers” to “enemies” but also drew attention to the “Teutonic rage” that had stained the grass red with Italian blood needlessly spilled. Indeed, it was no coincidence that communes had caricatures of naughty condottieri undergoing horrible punishments painted in public places as frequently as they commemorated the same men with imposing monuments.
Condottieri were addicted to anarchy and death. Their bands were given to wholesale outlawry, often in the lands of their erstwhile employers. Plundering, looting, and raping wherever they chose, mercenaries could enrich themselves with great ease while leaving suffering and chaos in their wake. Condottieri themselves were, however, often even worse than the troops they commanded. Many were almost sadistic in their cruelty. Malatesta da Verucchio (1212–1312), for example, secured his family’s rule of Rimini by assassinating all of his rivals with unusual viciousness, thereby earning a place in Dante’s Inferno. His son was no better. On discovering that his wife, Francesca da Polenta, was conducting an adulterous affair with his brother Paolo, Giovanni Malatesta (1240/44–1304) slaughtered them both with his own hands.
This casts Uccello’s portrait of Hawkwood in a very different light. Far from merely wishing to commemorate the crack commander of a highly prized company of professional troops, Florence was also more than a little afraid of the man on whom it had come to depend so profoundly. Although they might have represented the best of what mercenaries could be during the Renaissance, Hawkwood’s equestrian monument shows that the good were not so good, and that the magnificent artworks erected in their memory are a testimony more to the fear they instilled in others than to the virtue they embodied.
THE BAD: LORDS OF WAR AND KINGS OF PATRONAGE
Not only was the character of the condottieri to change significantly in the century after Hawkwood’s death, but the moral standing of mercenary generals was also to take a dramatic turn for the worse. And, like so much else in the Renaissance, these changes were to catalyze a seismic shift in the way mercenaries approached art: a shift that transformed them from being the objects of patronage to being patrons in their own right.
Originally commissioned for the ducal bedchamber in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, Pedro Berruguete’s Portrait of Duke Federico and His Son Guidobaldo (ca. 1476–77; Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino) is an intimate depiction of one of the most prominent condottieri of the fifteenth century (Fig. 27). Seated on a high-backed chair, Federico III da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, is shown reading a finely bound codex in a full suit of armor while his son and heir stands at his side. He is the very image of the learned warrior-knight. His nobility is beyond question. While his stoat-trimmed crimson mantle testifies to his aristocratic title, he discreetly shows off the symbols of his chivalric nature. Around his neck hangs the pendant of the Order of the Ermine, bestowed upon him by Ferrante I of Aragon, king of Naples; on his left leg can be seen the Order of the Garter, which he received from Edward IV of England; and on the shelf in front of him sits a jeweled miter presented by the Ottoman sultan.
In depicting his patron in such a manner, Berruguete encapsulated the highest points of Federico’s glittering career as a condottiere, as well as the essence of the second generation of Renaissance mercenary generals. During the ferocious battles of the fifteenth century, and especially in the course of the Lombard Wars of ca. 1425–54, the nature of warfare had changed dramatically. Campaigns had become more brutal, conflicts had started to last for longer periods of time, and alliances between increasingly centralized states had made wars altogether larger-scale affairs. The “art of war” had now evolved into “military science.” Neither city-republics nor signori could rely on hiring loose bands of unreliable and itinerant foreigners to meet the latest unexpected crisis. They began thinking in terms of long-term defensive strategies. And for this, they needed clearly defined military units that were not only better equipped and trained but also more hierarchically arranged and better disposed to giving loyal service on a semipermanent basis.
A new breed of condottieri started to emerge. They increasingly came to be landed Italian natives, often the younger sons of noble houses in search of betterment. With land at their disposal, men like Jacopo dal Verme (1350–1409), Facino Cane (1360–1412), andMuzio Attendolo Sforza (1369–1424) could count on a ready supply of men, had the steady revenues to equip their troops, and could be relied upon to put a dependable number of soldiers into the field. This being so, the nature of their relationship with their employers also changed. The increasing weight and professionalism of mercenary armies made them more valuable, and not only did certain condottieri gain appointment as captains general for life, but a great many commanders were also offered unprecedented rewards in an effort to guarantee their fidelity in the long term. Quite apart from the vast sums of money conventionally paid to skilled generals, cities and signori began to hand over entire palaces (sometimes even towns) and to bestow noble titles on their most senior condot- tieri (a practice technically known as infeudation). By giving them land, wealth, and a quasi-feudal link to the employer-lord, cities and signori hoped they would have a powerful reason to remain loyal and to serve well. In a sense, it was an attempt to turn mercenary companies into citizen armies.
Federico da Montefeltro seemed to demonstrate just how effective the results of these changes could be, and Berruguete’s depiction of him in all his finery is a testament to the impressive success he came to embody. The illegitimate son of Count Guidantonio da Montefeltro, Federico had taken up arms as a mercenary for the first time when he was only sixteen and, having found himself naturally suited to the art of war, racked up a string of brilliant victories, often against almost overwhelming odds. He single-handedly saved Milan from being overrun by the Venetian forces led by Bartolomeo Colleoni at the Battle of Riccardina (Molinella) in 1467, earned the gratitude of Pope Pius II for checking the ambitions of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, and was lauded to the skies for successfully besieging Volterra on Florence’s behalf in 1472. So towering a figure did he become that he was often paid huge sums of money simply to refrain from fighting: during a war against Ferrara in 1480–82, for example, Venice offered him 80,000 florinsjust to stay at home. Military success brought Federico enormous wealth, a raft of coveted honors, and the admiration of Europe’s greatest potentates. By the close of his mercenary career in 1474, he had been raised to the ducal dignity, granted the title of apostolic vicar, named commander in chief of the armies of the Church, and inducted into some of the highest orders of chivalry in existence.
As Berruguete’s portrait indicates, Federico had acquired a dazzling reputation as one of the foremost military commanders of his day and seemed to have epitomized all that was good about the fifteenth-century condottiere. As early as 1464, Gianmario Filelfo—the son of Francesco—had hailed him as a new Hercules and had devoted his epic poem, the Martiados, to celebrating Federico’s near-mythical status as a warlike hero, an image that was repeated in magnificent style in Pierantonio Paltroni’s laudatory biography. Even the Florentine Cristoforo Landino observed in his Disputationes Camaldulenses that he was certainly “worth comparing to the best captains of the ancient era.” After his death, Federico was singled out by Baldassare Castiglione for having been “the light of Italy.” There was, he claimed, no lack of witnesses
to his prudence, humanity, justice, generosity, and unconquerable spirit, and to his military skills, which was brilliantly attested by his many victories, his ability to capture impregnable places, his swift and decisive expeditions, his having routed many times with few troops great and formidable armies, and his never having lost a single battle. So we can fairly compare him with many famous men of the ancient world.
Federico was, indeed, almost a walking advertisement for the “modern mercenary general.”
What was more, the fact that Berruguete portrayed Federico reading a codex clearly revealed the duke’s passionate interest in learning and the arts, and in this respect, too, the artist proved himself to be an acute observer of the changes that military advancements had wrought on the cultural outlook of condottieri in the fifteenth century. Now that they were wealthy, titled individuals, they found they wanted to legitimate the social position they had acquired through force of arms by using art to cloak themselves with an aura of respectability. And to do this, they needed to ensure that their art would celebrate their strengths and gloss over the more questionable side to their occupation.
Berruguete’s decision to portray Federico in full battle dress testified to the condottieri’s preoccupation with recasting the undeniably militaristic side of their lives. No matter how successful or powerful they may have been, they were aware that most people viewed the way they earned their daily bread as dreadful. A soldier’s life may not have been a happy one, but a mercenary’s life was—as Machiavelli’s comments in The Prince alone illustrate—at best, one of unreliability and treachery, and, at worst, one devoted to the science of slaughter. As their social position improved, condottieri naturally wanted some way of overcoming this unfortunate, if entirely justified, public image.
The humanists’ preoccupation with the classics offered a way forward. Ancient history and mythology were replete with emperors, generals, gods, and heroes who were certainly not whiter than white but who were nevertheless lionized purely for their strength and fighting abilities. In spite of attempts to see certain tales as allegories of Christian morality, might was generally right, and displays of courage—in almost any context—could be equated with virtue. Hercules, Cadmus, Perseus, and Theseus were acclaimed by the humanists as models of aggressive, muscular goodness, while the emperors Hadrian and Trajan—along with Julius Caesar, whose monarchy/tyranny was otherwise open to debate—were held up as the acmes of the warlike prince.
However, such texts often had a relatively limited audience. Mercenary generals wanted a bigger public. The patronage of art offered the ideal opportunity to make the desired connections with ancient heroes more explicit.
One of the most obvious and highly favored vehicles for this was funerary art, and there is no more dramatic or impressive example than the chapel constructed by Bartolomeo Colleoni in his native town of Bergamo at some point in the 1470s. As all of his contemporaries knew, the project had been dear to Colleoni’s heart for a long time. Indeed, he was so hell-bent on building the chapel that he was reputed to have marched his troops into the town and demolished the old sacristy abutting Santa Maria Maggiore so that the chapter of the church would have no opportunity to object to the site he intended for his monument. Apocryphal though the tale may be, there was no doubt that Colleoni had his heart set on making the chapel the perfect testament to his “virtuous” character and worked closely with his architect, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, to ensure that iconographical details would be included that would speak to the “goodness” of all he had achieved. The facade is particularly revealing. On either side of the great rose window, Colleoni had placed two tabernacles, one containing a bust of Julius Caesar, the other a bust of Trajan. The implied parallel was clear. He was an “undefeated general” (as the inscription on his tomb claims), and his military genius matched that of both Caesar and Trajan, whose moral rectitude and feats of arms no one would deny and whose authority seemed beautifully to gloss over the bloody and unpleasant side of Colleoni’s mercenary life.
A more subtle method of underscoring the parallel with ancient models was the equestrian statue. Although the statue of Marcus Aurelius now standing in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome is the only complete surviving example, such works were frequently used in antiquity to emphasize the active military leadership, triumphant record, and justice of a particular figure, and—having fallen out of favor during the Middle Ages—they reemerged with renewed vigor as a mode of portrayal during the early Renaissance. With its implied associations with outstanding Roman emperors of the past, the equestrian statue (tried out earlier in pictorial form in Uccello’s monument to Sir John Hawkwood) became a particular favorite of condottieri eager to cloak themselves in an unrealistic mantle of virtue. In 1475, Colleoni bequeathed a huge sum of money to have an equestrian statue of himself erected in Venice, and although his wish to be commemorated in the Piazza San Marco was ultimately unrealized, an imposing—even fearsome—piece designed by Andrea del Verrocchio still stands in the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo. His fellow general Erasmo da Narni (Gattamelata; 1370–1443) had a similar, if more placid-looking, statue by Donatello erected outside Il Santo in Padua, a city he had briefly ruled on Venice’s behalf.
But other, yet more sophisticated and clever methods of linking condottieri with ancient paragons were also available, and no one was more willing to explore them than Federico da Montefeltro. Apart from Berruguete’s painting, one of the more inventive approaches appears in a double-sided portrait of the duke and his wife painted by Piero della Francesca ca. 1474 (Uffizi, Florence). On the reverse of the panel showing Federico’s profile, he is depicted being borne along on a triumphal chariot, seated in a folded chair in full armor and carrying a scepter. The allegorical figure of Victory holds a laurel crown above his head, while personifications of the four cardinal virtues sit in attendance at the front of the chariot. Heavily influenced by classical histories, it was a clever attempt to portray the “triumphant” Federico as the direct heir of the heroes of ancient Rome while simultaneously stressing that “victory” was as much a proof of the duke’s moral rectitude as it had been for the Roman generals whom all admired. As the inscription below the scene expressed it: “He rides illustrious in glorious triumph—he whom, as he wields the sceptre in moderation, the eternal fame of his virtues celebrates as equal to the greatest generals.”
In the second place, Berruguete’s portrait of Federico also indicates that condottieri were eager to make military might not just heroic but respectable, even admirable in some respects. This was, of course, no easy task. As far as the Church was concerned, military might was only justifiable when linked with acts of virtuous heroism or holy war: the butchery favored by soldiers of fortune was categorically immoral, and they themselves were little more than killers for hire. Theologians from the earliest days of the Church had been united in condemning rape, pillage, torture, and murder as among the worst sins imaginable.
Since mercenaries showed absolutely no inclination to abandon their savage ways, the strictures of the Church were the source of a major image problem.
Quite apart from the lavish amounts of money habitually given to churches and religious institutions, the condottieri sensed that military saints represented a handy vehicle for giving their nefarious deeds a veneer of respectability. There was, of course, no shortage of soldier-saints to pick from. The Church had long celebrated figures such as Saint George, Saint Martin, and Saint Eustace, and had hailed the fighting skills of the archangel Michael. By nurturing the cult of such warlike heroes, condottieri could implicitly identify themselves with Christian virtue. No one with a deep attachment to such saints, it was thought, could possibly be wicked.
More direct was the technique of having a portrait included in an overtly religious painting. Like contemporary merchant bankers, condottieri were quite keen on having themselves depicted as witnesses to or participants in scenes from religious history. A good example is provided by Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro Altarpiece (Brera, Milan), which was commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro in 1472–74 (Fig. 28). Here, the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ once again take center stage, surrounded by a whole bevy of impressive saints, although none of them military in character. In the foreground, however, kneels Federico himself. Arrayed in full battle gear, his helmet and gauntlets lying on the ground before him, he is the very model of the devout worshipper. The intended implication is clear. Although a soldier by profession, he was a soldier for Christ; faith came first. To anyone acquainted with his nefarious personal history, it was patent nonsense, but it was nonetheless a highly effective visual strategy, and there is no reason to believe it did not get the desired message across to his subjects in Urbino.
But of all the ways of putting a positive moral spin on killing, none was better—or more exciting—than pure, unalloyed culture. Aping the manners of their signorial masters, condottieri strove to endow themselves with an air of justice and civilized sophistication by nurturing fully fledged courts, the artistic culture of which testified to the respectability they craved so desperately. The master at this was unquestionably Federico da Montefeltro, a fact vividly indicated by the inclusion of the codex in Pedro Berruguete’s portrait.
After succeeding his half brother, Oddantonio, in 1444, Federico had transformed Urbino into one of the most brilliant cultural centers in northern Italy. He was a classical scholar who had been educated by the renowned Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua, and his passion for the new humanistic trends was well-known. He was a true bibliophile, as the lavish and telling decorations of his studioli in Urbino and Gubbio testify. According to Vespasiano da Bisticci, he devoted not less than 30,000 ducats (more than four thousand times the annual wage of a household servant) to assembling the largest library outside the Vatican. He surrounded himself with learned men and made his court a magnet for literary talent. An acquaintance of Cristoforo Landino (whose likeness was included in a double portrait), he directly employed the astrologer James of Spiers, Ficino’s friend Paul of Middelburg, Francesco Filelfo and his son, the irascible poet laureate Gianmario, and rising stars such as Porcellio Pandoni, Lilio Tifernate, Agostino Fregoso, and Lodovico Odasio. Orators were unusually highly prized by the warlike duke. Indeed, one Latin oration made by Antonio Bonfini in 1478 was so esteemed by Federico that he had the event commemorated in a painting by Justus of Ghent (now in Hampton Court).
Perhaps as a result of a youth spent at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, Federico also had a deep sensitivity for art and architecture and, emulating Cosimo de’ Medici’s obsession with “magnificence,” lavished money on every imaginable form of patronage. In 1464, he commissioned the Dalmatian architect Luciano Laurana (later replaced by Francesco di Giorgio Martini) to rebuild the Palazzo Ducale completely and, in doing so, created one of the most dramatic and impressive of all Renaissance palaces. Sumptuous almost to a fault, Federico’s new residence was filled with the works of the best artists of the day, and he was to become a long-standing patron of painters including Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Justus of Ghent, and Pedro Berruguete himself. So fabulous was Federico’s court that he was later acclaimed by the apostolic secretary Paolo Cortesi (1465–1510) as one of the two greatest patrons of art of the period (the other being Cosimo de’ Medici).
Yet at the same time, Berruguete’s portrait discreetly testifies to a very different side of Federico da Montefeltro’s character. As in all other surviving depictions of the condottiere, Berruguete’s portrait shows Federico in profile. Only the left part of his face is visible, while his nose seems strangely hooked. In his youth, he had been horribly wounded in a joust. His right eye had been torn out, leaving him with a huge and horrible scar across his face. Finding his field of vision severely restricted, and fearful of being surprised, he had surgeons hack out the bridge of his nose. Although he was careful only to be painted from the side from this point on, there was no disguising the personality traits that had been revealed by his injury. Despite his undoubted courage, he was impulsive and violent in the extreme. And perhaps most important, the lengths to which he was prepared to go to prevent anyone from sneaking up on him point not only toward a measure of paranoia, but also toward a ruthless character that viewed conspiracies and assassinations as a natural part of life.
Federico was not unusual. Although they had become more effective commanders and more attentive patrons, fifteenth-century condottieri were worse than their fourteenth-century counterparts in almost every respect, and it is no exaggeration to say that their enthusiasm for the arts grew in direct proportion to their mounting brutality.
Almost inevitably, the landed interests, long-term appointments, and progressive infeudation of condottieri conspired to politicize the role of the mercenary commander. Far from being more closely bound to their employers as a result of the emoluments and prizes they received, the condottieri of the fifteenth century became increasingly independent political actors. Although some—like Bartolomeo Colleoni—were to earn a reputation for loyalty, the majority recognized that they, too, were players in the great game of Italian politics and were in a position to make significant gains for themselves. Mercenaries had found themselves in similar situations before (Castruccio Castracani, signore of Lucca, being one of the more notorious examples), but the fact that the greater number were exiles or foreigners had meant instances of autonomous political action were few and far between: from the fifteenth century onward, they were more and more the norm.
This only served to compound many of the mercenary generals’ worst character traits. Although they never entirely abandoned the time-honored practice of looting and pillaging, condottieri like Federico da Montefeltro were acutely conscious of the immense influence they wielded and had no compunction about manipulating it for their own ends. Even the best of them was prepared essentially to blackmail his employers for greater rewards, a fact that was excoriated by the Florentine chancellor Leonardo Bruni in hisDe militia (1421). As Niccolò Machiavelli complained in The Prince in the next century,
Mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined, and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy; they have no fear of God; they do not keep faith with their fellows; they avoid defeat just so long as they avoid battle; in peacetime you are despoiled by them, and in wartime by the enemy … if [condottieri] are [skilled], you cannot trust them, because they are anxious to advance their own greatness, either by coercing you, their employers, or by coercing others against your own wishes.
In contrast to the mercenary generals of earlier centuries, this new breed of condottieri often wanted more than just cash. Far from tightening their hold over their employees, signori often found that their openhanded displays of generosity obliged them to go cap-in-hand to their increasingly wealthy captains. In 1441, for example, Niccolò Piccinino (1386–1444) haughtily demanded to be invested with the fiefdom of Piacenza before he would deign to fight for Filippo Maria Visconti against the Papal States in the Fourth Lombard War. Furious, Visconti exclaimed,
These condottieri have now reached the stage when, if they are defeated, we pay for their failures, and, if victors, we must satisfy their demands and throw ourselves at their feet—even more than if they were our enemies. Must the Duke of Milan bargain for the victory of his own troops, and strip himself to receive favours from them?
Even when placed in positions of trust in peacetime, they were liable to abuse their authority in the most outrageous manner. On being appointed to the governorship of Bologna by the antipope John XXIII in 1411, Braccio da Montone (1368–1424) proceeded to exact what amounted to protection money from the towns nearby.
It would, however, be wrong to think that mercenary generals restricted themselves to extortion. Possessing territories of their own, noble condottieri lusted constantly for ever more lands and had no shame about nibbling away at the fringes of the greater Italian states amid the chaos of war. This, indeed, was a particularly pronounced phenomenon among those mercenary generals who came from the marches, a kind of no-man’s-land between the Milanese, Venetian, and papal spheres of interest. Sometimes, urban centers would hand themselves over to a condottiere voluntarily, in the hope that by submitting, they would gain his assistance in ongoing feuds. In 1407, for example, Rocca Contrada (now Arcevia in the Marche) gave itself to Braccio da Montone in return for his aid against Fermo. But most of the time, condottieri were more than prepared to hold entire cities to ransom or simply to seize whatever towns took their fancy. Pandolfo III Malatesta—scion of one of the most notorious mercenary houses of all—was among the worst in this regard. Taking a break from his campaigns on behalf of Venice in the early years of the century, Pandolfo seized the papal towns of Narni and Todi and rampaged happily through Como, Brescia, and Bergamo over the next decades with the express intention of carving out a little empire of his own on his employers’ doorstep. Similarly, in the confusion that reigned after the death of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan in 1447, Francesco Sforza did not hesitate to take the Milanese city of Pavia for himself, even though he was nominally the captain general of Milan. Nothing was sacred.
But most of all, the increasingly political autonomy of fifteenth-century condottieri predisposed them toward coups, conspiracies, and the most brutal acts of murder. Although some, like Bartolomeo Colleoni and Erasmo da Narni, were unusually decent sorts in this regard, it was certainly not unknown for condottieri to hack down anyone who stood between them and their dreams of grandeur. After the death of his erstwhile patron, Francesco Sforza not only took Pavia but also turned against the short-lived Golden Ambrosian Republic, sided with Venice, and forced Milan to acclaim him duke. Those who had opposed him were immediately rounded up and executed, their heads put on display on spikes on the Broletto Nuovo as a grisly warning to anyone who thought about getting in Francesco’s way.
To say that ambitious, independent-minded, and politically aware condottieri were prepared to butcher their way to power is, however, to tell only half the story. More often than not, they acknowledged no bonds of loyalty whatsoever, even where those bonds were grounded in blood. A surprising number of condottieri killed, captured, fought, or usurped members of their own families in the most coldhearted manner imaginable. Taddeo Manfredi (1431–ca. 1486), lord of Imola, was thought very mild merely for fighting a decades-long war against his uncle Astorre II Manfredi, who happened to control neighboring Faenza. Only a few years earlier, Pino I Ordelaffi (ca. 1356–1402) had seized power in Forlì after usurping and imprisoning his uncle Sinibaldo, and was later to poison his cousin Giovanni for similar ends. Worse still was Oliverotto da Fermo (1475–1502), who was to be held up as the paradigm of evil by Machiavelli. Unable to brook even the slightest restraint on his ambition, Oliverotto felt that it was “servile” to take orders from anyone, least of all from his maternal uncle Giovanni Fogliani, who was then in control of Fermo, albeit in a benign and protective capacity. As Machiavelli recorded, after returning to his native city from campaigning,
Oliverotto prepared a formal banquet to which he invited Giovanni Fogliani and the leading citizens of Fermo. After they had finished eating and all the other entertainment usual at such banquets was done with, Oliverotto artfully started to touch on subjects of grave importance … When Giovanni and the others began to discuss these subjects in turn, he got to his feet all of a sudden, saying that these were things to be spoken of somewhere more private, and he withdrew to another room, followed by Giovanni and all the other citizens. And no sooner were they seated than soldiers appeared from hidden recesses, and killed Giovanni and all the others. After this slaughter, Oliverotto mounted his horse, rode through the town, and laid siege to the palace of the governing council; consequently they were frightened into obeying him and into setting up a government of which he made himself the prince.
Federico da Montefeltro’s supposed involvement in the assassination of his half brother was remarkable only in that he seems to have taken the trouble to employ a little subtlety.
Cruelty and murder in the service of broader political ends were one thing; an almost sadistic viciousness was quite another. And it seemed that mercenary captains’ propensity for violence and brutality grew in proportion to their independence and military strength. Giovanni Bentivoglio (1443–1508), tyrant of Bologna, for example, earned notoriety for torturing and murdering the astrologer Luca Gaurico simply for giving an unfavorable prophecy, while his contemporary Everso II degli Anguillara (d. 1464) was “blasphemous and cruel and could kill a man as easily as he could a sheep.” Indeed, Everso
raped [the] wives and daughters [of his subjects] in his palace; he constantly indulged in adultery and fornication and was even accused of incest, as if the chastity of his own daughters meant nothing. He often flogged his sons and threatened them with his sword.
Even worse was Braccio da Montone, whom Michael Mallett has rightly acclaimed as one of the two greatest condottieri of the period. Though he thought Braccio “pleasant and charming in conversation,” Pius II observed that “in his heart, he was cruel”:
He would laugh as he ordered men to be tortured and racked by the most excruciating torments, and he took pleasure in hurling his wretched victims off the tops of towers. At Spoleto, when a messenger brought him a hostile letter, he had him flung headlong from a high bridge. In Assisi, he pitched three men off the high tower in the piazza. When eighteen friars in the convent of the Minorites dared to oppose him, he had their testicles beaten to a pulp on an anvil.
Federico da Montefeltro might not have been so inventively savage, but he was certainly typical of fifteenth-century condottieri in concealing a very unpleasant nature behind his public persona. An illegitimate son, his path to power in Urbino had been paved with violence. When, in 1444, his younger half brother, Oddantonio, was unexpectedly assassinated by an angry mob, the twenty-two-year-old Federico immediately became count. Of course, he claimed that he had nothing to do with the plot. But there was no denying the fact that he happened to be waiting outside the city with a posse of soldiers at just the right moment to step quickly and easily into Oddantonio’s still-warm shoes. Federico’s bloody fingerprints were all over the affair, yet he does not appear to have been troubled by any pangs of guilt.
Not content with mere fratricide, Federico was among the most underhanded, backstabbing men of the age. Though charming to a fault, he lived and breathed treachery and never seems to have thought twice about spying, poisoning, and murder. The most dramatic example of his amorality is provided by his betrayal of some of his closest friends and allies. Despite his earlier collusion with Cosimo de’ Medici, Federico conspired with Pope Sixtus IV to aid the Pazzi family in killing Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo and seizing control of Florence in 1478. Corresponding with his network of spies and cutthroats around Italy using a secret (and only recently deciphered) code, Federico arranged to maneuver some six hundred heavily armed troops outside Florence, ready to storm in as soon as the Medici had been given the coup de grâce. It was more by a stroke of luck than as a result of failure in the planning that Lorenzo de’ Medici escaped with his life. But when confronted with his treacherous role in the conspiracy, Federico simply shrugged once again. For him, a condottiere could not afford to have friends. He may have lived by the sword, but he wasn’t going to die by it or let the deaths of others trouble him too much. And this was precisely what he was trying to conceal with Berruguete’s portrait.
THE UGLY: MERCENARIES ON THE EDGE OF MADNESS
If condottieri like Sir John Hawkwood and Federico da Montefeltro were bad, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was the paradigm of all that was truly dreadful about the Renaissance mercenary. He pushed the boundaries further than anyone else and was able to do so by virtue of the interplay between the peculiar balance of power in Renaissance Italy and his own unique psychology.
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 Alfonso 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.
The most immediately striking feature of the work is that Sigismondo is doing homage not to the Virgin Mary or to Christ himself (as his rival was to be shown doing in the Montefeltro Altarpiece) but to a saint. That he should have venerated saints was, in itself, not so very remarkable—the Medici, for example, were fostering the cult of their own “family” saints at precisely the same time—but both the saint in question and the manner in which he is depicted are unusual. Here, Sigismondo is praying to Saint Sigismund, a figure with more than a few interesting characteristics. A comparatively uncommon object of veneration in northern Italy, Sigismund was the patron saint of soldiers, renowned for showing courage and fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds in the early sixth century. What was more, Sigismund had a rather peculiar history for a saint. Although he later abandoned the throne of Burgundy for a monastic life and was eventually martyred for his faith, he had had his own son strangled for insulting his wife and opposing his rule. No less intriguing is his appearance. The thin, flat halo above his hat notwithstanding, Sigismund doesn’t look much like a saint. Seated on a throne and carrying an orb and scepter, he has the bearing of a king but none of the typical attributes of a holy man. In fact, the figure of Saint Sigismund is modeled directly on extant portraits of the contemporary Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, whom Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta had served and by whom he had been knighted. The iconographical effect is significant. On the one hand, Sigismondo is unapologetically venerating warlike rulership as a good in itself. On the other hand, Sigismondo wished to be seen doing homage to the Holy Roman Emperor. This was a pointed political dig. Although Sigismondo’s title to Rimini officially derived from the pope, he is here showing his absolute allegiance to an entirely different source of higher authority. The fact that Sigismondo, Saint Sigismund, and the emperor Sigismond all shared the same name serves to heighten the sense of identification among the three figures: Sigismondo wanted to be seen not merely as a devotee of a saint and an emperor but also as the equivalent of both. He was the warlike prince, the paradigm of courage, unjustly persecuted for his campaigns, the perfect ruler, the summit of earthly authority. A pious Christian he was not; indeed, there’s no sense in which the fresco sought to overcome—or even acknowledge—the immorality of Sigismondo’s actions.
Strange though it may seem, Sigismondo’s portrait in Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem was conceived in the same vein. Few were more conscious of Sigismondo’s treacherous, callous, and dangerous character than Cosimo de’ Medici, but all of these things help to explain why the wily old banker wanted his portrait included in the fresco. Cosimo’s motivations were very similar to those felt by the Florentine Signoria when deciding to commission an equestrian monument to Sir John Hawkwood, although once again the reasons were subtly different as a consequence of Sigismondo’s distinctive character. It wasn’t just that Cosimo wanted to signal his friendship with the Wolf of Rimini to his enemies. He wanted to do a lot more. Back in 1444, Sigismondo had been employed by Alfonso V of Aragon to lead his campaign against Florence and had been paid a hefty sum of money for his services. The city had had good reason to be afraid. But for reasons best known to himself, Sigismondo had suddenly switched sides. As Pius II later recorded, “There is no doubt that Sigismondo’s perfidy was the salvation of the Florentine cause.” Cosimo, who never forgot a favor, was thankful that the Wolf of Rimini was such a fantastically talented backstabber and wanted him commemorated. But Cosimo was also deeply afraid of Sigismondo. Although he had been beaten back by his rivals after the Peace of Lodi, he was still a dangerous and unpredictable figure capable of wreaking havoc in Tuscany should the whim so take him. What was more, Sigismondo’s ongoing feud with Federico da Montefeltro (who had served both Florence and Milan in the 1440s and had entered the service of the Church in 1458) risked spilling over into Florentine territory, with potentially devastating consequences. Given Sigismondo’s volatile and vicious temper, it was essential that Cosimo maintain good relations, and by including his portrait in Gozzoli’s fresco, the old banker was able to give a clear signal that he wanted to be shoulder to shoulder with the Wolf of Rimini for the foreseeable future. Just as Sigismondo celebrated his own excesses as a condottiere, so Gozzoli’s fresco was a vivid testimony to the awe and dread he inspired.