like Bernardino or
Savonarola: they are often, strange to say, like the frightful Baglionis
of Perugia, passionately admired and loved by their countrymen. The
bodily portraits of these men, painted by the sternly realistic art of
the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, are even more confusing to
our ideas than their moral portraits drawn by historians and
chroniclers. Caesar Borgia, with his long fine features and noble head,
is a gracious and refined prince; there is, perhaps, a certain duplicity
in the well-cut lips; the beard, worn full and peaked in Spanish
fashion, forms a sort of mask to the lower part of the face, but what we
see is noble and intellectual. Sigismondo Malatesta has on his medals a
head whose scowl has afforded opportunity for various fine descriptions
of a blood maniac; but the head, thus found so expressive, of this
monster, is infinitely more human than the head on the medals of
Lionello d'Este, one of the most mild and cultivated of the decently
behaved Ferrarese princes. The very flower of precocious iniquity, the
young Baglionis, Vitellis, and Orsinis, grouped round Signorelli's
preaching Antichrist at Orvieto, are, in their gallantly trimmed jerkins
and jewelled caps, the veriest assemblage of harmless young dandies,
pretty and insipid; we can scarcely believe that these mild beardless
striplings, tight-waisted and well-curled like girls of sixteen, are the
terrible Umbrian brigand condottieri--Gianpaolos, Simonettos,
Vitellozzos, and Astorres--whose abominable deeds fill the pages of the
chronicles of Matarazzo, of Frolliere, of Monaldeschi. Nowhere among the
portraits of Renaissance monsters do we meet with anything like those
Roman emperors, whose frightful effigies, tumid, toad-like Vitelliuses
or rage-convulsed Caracallas, fill all our museums in marble or bronze
or loathsome purple porphyry; such types as these are as foreign to the
reality of the Italian Renaissance as are the Brachianos and
Lussuriosos, the Pieros and Corombonas, to the Italian fiction of the
sixteenth century.

Nor must such anomalies between the type of the men and their deeds,
between their abominable crimes and their high qualities, be merely made
a subject for grandiloquent disquisition. The man of the Renaissance, as
we have said, had no need to be a monster to do monstrous things; a
crime did not necessitate such a moral rebellion as requires complete
unity of nature, unmixed wickedness; it did not prec