Pico della Mirandola was dreaming of a reconciliation of the Hebrew, Pagan, and Christian traditions.

It is necessary to note these facts in passing; just as when we are surveying the history of letters and the arts, it becomes us to remember the crimes and the madness of the despots who patronized them.

This was an age in which even the wildest and most perfidious of tyrants felt the ennobling influences and the sacred thirst of knowledge.

Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the Lord of Rimini, might be selected as a true type of the princes who united a romantic zeal for culture with the vices of barbarians.[1] The coins which bear the portraits of this man, together with the medallions carved in red Verona marble on his church at Rimini, show a narrow forehead, protuberant above bushy eyebrows, a long hooked nose, hollow cheeks, and petulant, passionate, compressed lips.

The whole face seems ready to flash with sudden violence, to merge its self-control in a spasm of fury.