| The interior decoration of the Tempio Malatestiano provides a remarkable testimony to the interplay between the artistic and the literary endeavors in the early Renaissance. Moving from the discussion of its chronology and style to examine the cultural values shared by the Florentine sculptor Agostino di Duccio (1418-81/84?), his princely employer Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417-68) and the humanists then attached to the court of Rimini, this dissertation explores how Agostino's figural sculptures were perceived by the discerning fifteenth-century viewer in terms of their aesthetic merits, poetic content, and spiritual import. The argumentation rests on several hitherto virtually unheeded clues found in the contemporary writings of Roberto Valturio (1405-75), Basinio da Parma (1425-57), and Porcellio Pandone (ca. 1405-85). Fully discussed are their eulogies of the Tempio itself and special attention is given to Valturio's assertion that not only was the underlying conceptual framework of these images informed by philosophical wisdom, but also that they were meant to attract erudite attention by virtue of their exquisite workmanship and by displaying the expert "knowledge of forms," which term in turn implies that representations or historical, mythology and allegorical subjects were devised as decorous poetic inventions judiciously gleaned from classical and post-classical textual sources. This premise finds full confirmation in the analysis of the specific pictorial and literary traditions informing the sculptured cycles of the Sibyls, the Planetary Gods, the Signs of the Zodiac, Apollo and the Muses, as well as the multi-figure reliefs of the Triumph of Scipio and the "Temple of Minerva" on the Tomb of the Ancestors. Furthermore, the so-called Chapel of the Sibyls, the Chapel of the Planets, and the Chapel of the Angels, privately endowed by Isotta degli Atti (1432/33-74), are examined with respect to their imagery's religious context and their double purpose of serving for the respective patron's private contemplation and the public display of his or her's idealized identity. |
