Kirsty Roberts (UK)

Siggey Darlink, the poor devils are dying of the cold, come lunch with me you brute!

And that he did amongst other things Empty the fonts of the chiexa of holy water And fill up the same full with ink That he might in God's dishonour Stand before the doors of the said chiexa Making mock of the inky faithful, they Issuing thence by the doors in the pale light of the sunrise Which might be considered youthful levity but was really a profound indication; “whence that his, Sigismondo's, foetor filled the earth And stank up through the air and stars to heaven Where – save that they were immune from sufferings - It had made the emparadised spirits pewk” from their jewelled terrace. Ezra Pound Pisan Cantos

When I was sixteen, a friend invited me to spend a summer with her in Florence. Her stepdad, Father Lawrence had just become the priest at St Marks, an Anglo-Catholic church housed in Machiavelli's palace. The family lived on the first floor over the church, my friend and I had the run of Machiavelli's servant's quarters. I spent two months eyeing up the Fra Angelico frescos at San Marco, memorizing the Medici tombs at San Lorenzo, I was able to be by myself with the Giotto frescos in Santa Croce in the early mornings, we dined with contessas, went caper picking in the hills of Fiesole with an old woman who had actually had tea with Mussolini, I fell madly in love with a morose (and retired!) ballet dancer, converted to Catholicism in a candlelit ceremony where my feet were washed by the bishop of Rome, I went to an ambassadorial ball in my pyjamas (by accident), argued with bishops, played hide and seek in the Boboli gardens and had the Vasari corridor opened for me when I imperiously demanded the favour from a bratty prince who wanted to impress my friend. The doors to this strange and privileged kingdom slid firmly shut for me when I returned to England. The bunker-style Catholic church with an 80 yr old Irish Whiskey priest damning us to hell for hours on end just didn't cut it anymore (Father Laurence trained at RADA pre theology school, painted and had good taste in whiskey). My stay in Florence was like being on the set of a film. A concerted Catholic seduction which I have wondered much about ethically since, a glittery surface, a thin but convincing veneer.

I sit in the shadows of the Tempio Malatestiano, it's reliefs creep over my studio walls in good quality shiny photocopy. A feverish mixture of memory and hallucination imagined through the other voices I've read describing the place. The Space coloured by an illustrious chorus of literary giants claiming their space and distorting the other voices that still faintly populate the site. The Tempio Malatestiano is the: cathedral of a tacky beach resort; the eroticised pagan musings of a warlord; fascist temple; massacre site, this plot of land has been much contested. Built in Rimini on the orders of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta in 1450's. It's: formal innovation; unusual iconography; obsessive autobiography have turned it into a political vessel. Sigismondo the 'Wolf of Rimini' began building the church in 1446, a poet and patron of the arts as well as a mercenary soldier he gathered intellectuals and artists around his court. He fell out with Pope Pius the second over the building of the church, and over his military campaigns, the pope's view of him as a tyrant and womanizer responsible for “rape, adultery and incest, an enemy of every peace and well living” has become his accepted biography, backed up by the images found at the church he commissioned. The possibilities of an Architectural biography, a voice recorded in a site. The building becomes a stage, a place where a character is delineated. At the Tempio Malatestiano the process is extremely deliberate, we are told that Sigismondo associates himself with an elephant, there are elephants all over the church, along with his face in profile, his insignia, his initials intertwined with those of his lover. A very particular history and taste inscribed in a surface. I'm interested in the material readings of the site by Ezra Pound, Aby Warburg and Adrian Stokes in 1913-27. In how a character has been fossilised in a site creating a powerful and ambivalent mythology. For me this site is overdetermined, housing a choir of squabbling art historians, cultural tastemakers, historical re-enactment societies.

My obsession with the Tempio Malatestiano began at 18 when I first read Adrian Stokes, my impression of the Agostino di Duccio reliefs that live at the church was first constructed through their literary offspring. The Stones of Rimini is full of long, repetitive descriptions of the reliefs, these descriptions place Agostino's work at the pinnacle of the lost art of carving, Stokes argues that Donatello was a modeller, not a carver, his works, which are easier to digest as images sounded the death knell for the more subtle material art practiced by Agostino di Duccio (a proper sculptor!). Agostino was firmly bound to his patron, the larger part of his surviving works are at the Tempio Malatestiano. Adrian Stoke's sickly sweet Stones of Rimini impressed me enormously at 18. I'd never read any art history before. He spoke like a latter day Ruskin, an anachronistic insistence on sculptural concerns, a quest for truth. The book is an exploration of the relationship between stone and water, imagined through the stones of Rimini and the architecture of Venice, translating nature's processes to artworks, talking about sculpture as sedimentation, an encrustation, a stone -blossom. Re-reading the Stones of Rimini last year I realised that underlying the repetitive descriptions of the contents of the Tempio's chapels Stokes was proposing an extremely retrogressive form of localism, a stone has a preference as to how it sits, how it weathers, a stone ideally is used locally, and positioned much as it was in it's bed, a stone which has been used outside of these natural guidelines will always look odd, out of place. Somehow, through endless repetition these proclamations start to take on a social dimension (for me at least) becoming a very conservative set of rules for behaviour, the rules inscribed, deviation ridiculed. This is a very particular reading of the Tempio Malatestiano, it's oddities put on a pedestal in order to iron out future attempts at oddness. I started to form an impression of this atmosphere as politics. I wonder what it is about this site that leads to right-wing idealism, how a community of thinkers gather around an object. Stoke's material reading of the Tempio Malatestiano was very directly influenced by Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos. The two men met and discussed the church, though there is no mention of Pound's shadow which hovers over the Stones of Rimini in the book. My edition is later, post WWII, Pound's reputation shattered by his continued defence of Mussolini, incarcerated in an American prison's psychiatric unit as he avoided a death sentence for treachery through madness. Perhaps his importance to Stoke's argument has been erased, the nasty fascist residues in the text abstracted, I feel that the text and the site are haunted by these conversations. I feel somehow implicated. Last summer I started a cycle pilgrimage to the church from Basel, I printed out a pilgrim's passport intending to follow the via Francigena through the Alps and the Appenini to Tuscany then cut back across the lowlands to Rimini. I was extremely nervous about visiting the Tempio Malatestiano, I had formed a gothic fantasy that this place was where art writers indulged in their wildest macho extravagances. Sigismondo was a mercenary general, he was excommunicated by his enemy the Pope supposedly, in part at least for the excesses of the imagery at the Tempio. His army was a thorn in the Pope's side, eventually a veritable crusade was led against Sigismondo, his armies crushed, his territories reduced to the town of Rimini itself, he died a few months later, in 1468 a broken man by all accounts. The church has never been entirely finished. As I started to get close to Rimini I spoke to people about the church, at an American themed street party in St Pietro in Vincoli I heard the common tale that it was a lascivious work, a pagan temple, dedicated to pleasure rather than to god. The great beauty of the church was praised, the doctrinal basis held in doubt. The people who knew of the church all told a similar story. I wondered what historical basis there is for this idea, the facts seem sketchy at best in historical accounts, the version told by Ezra Pound seem to have infiltrated the common perception of the place.

“In a sense, every life that is recounted is offered as an example; we write in order to attack or defend a view of the universe, and to set forth a system of conduct which is our own. It is none the less true, however, that nearly every biographer disqualifies himself by over-idealising his subject or deliberate disparagement, by exaggerated stress on certain details or by cautious omission of others”. Marguerite Yourcenar

Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta is one of the most legible historical characters voiced in the Pisan Cantos. We are given his post-bag to read : the domestic squabbles with his mistress, the divine Isotta; budget notes for the church; orders written to the foreman onsite dictating how the masons and artists should work; impressions from the battlefield; political intrigue; religious defection; boasts from the foreman on how they managed to steal marble intended for a bridge and tombstones for the front of the church, their carvings incorporated into the overall design. Sigismondo's character in the Cantos is constructed from the commissioned stone, a more sympathetic character reading than Pope Pius II's. The Cantos wander widely in time and distance, the history of the world through a series of heroic voices, our Sidge is the poster boy of this masculine resurgence. The Tempio Malatestiano is fascinating and repugnant in it's literary accounts it proposes that modernity is virility plus violence and perpetuates the idea (still all too present in my opinion) that an artist should be young, strong and full of cum. Mussolini is cast as the natural heir to Sigismondo's political fortune. These things felt like a constant in the literature I read about the Church, I couldn't work out if it was something embodied in the stone, the figure of an anti-establishment warrior, or a string of obscure influence/ incidental conversations which we no longer have access to at play. I feel desperately uncomfortable with the view of the universe given by Pound, and read the reliefs with his poetry whirring round my head but I am fascinated by his living history. The Cantos are a bit like a celebrity gossip magazine but for the history of the world rather than contemporary L.A, a seemingly endless chronicle of who has slept with who, secret murders, castrations, incest, fraud, embezzlement, dishonesty. Though the Cantos are fiercely individualist (Pound the political thinker seems to hold great store in the image of a man struggling against adversity) he speaks with many voices. The Cantos don't drag us through an ordered vision of history, they are meandering, this is not history as progress, or apocalypse, it sin't something argued with a particular aim, he also doesn't give us any help with the text, there are no footnotes, no factual information to key into the reference heavy, macaronic text. He gives us unmediated access to material, to transmit the vitality of a voice, a conversation, an impulse across the centuries. In trawling through the libraries, the footnotes, indexes, archives this irresponsible (but visionary) scholar has a cast of characters introduce themselves on their own terms.

Florence “has not only preserved the images of it's dead in unique abundance and with striking vitality: in the hundreds of archival documents that have been read and the thousands that have not the voices of the dead live on”. Aby Warburg went through the Renaissance archives listening for the voices of the dead “the tone and timbre of those unheard voices can be recreated by the historian who does not shrink from the pious task of restoring the natural connection between word and image....Sigismondo's humanist library, Ezra Pound, Pope Pius II, here I think we have a real synchronicity between image and discourse. The discourse has leaked into the popular view of the image, the image has to a point dictated the discourse. It felt inappropriate to fly into Rimini with Ryanair. I wanted to be able to think through these heroics, to switch off my automatic disapproval. I slept in a ditch in a lay-by 50m from where the Italian army were doing their wild camping exercises in neat snot-green lines, safeguarded by them somehow as long as they didn't know of my presence. I slept in the woods by an enormous Etruscan burial site, the eyes of the tomb/ caves visible in the moonlight. I got mild sunstroke, then read my little volume of modernist poetry until frightened half to death, hearing crones chant 'those are pearls that was his eyes' in my sleep. Near Milan I turned up at a friend's house in time for the end of his birthday party. I was dirty and badly dressed after a long day cycling, the village was all dressed up for a religious procession. All the houses wore blue and gold robes with heavy tassels, a continuous stream of candlelit, dressed houses from the Church to the outskirts, then up a hill, a float carrying our lady (a polychrome) who was put in 7 temporary chapels on the way up the hill while the crowd sings the seven stations of the cross. We were half-cut, our re-union was not solemn enough for the chanting crowds, we were shooed off giggling. In Florence I returned to La Specola. During a corpse-shortage the medical school commissioned the sculptors working on the churches to make medical dummies for them. The pale patrician women, moulded in wax can be opened up, this one shows a breached foetus, that one a cancer, their bodies can be taken apart and re-constructed, the organs taken out, examined, replaced. Entombed in museum display cases, a part of the university collection they sit in a museum with a menagerie of stuffed creatures in naturalistic settings. I got lost in another set of mountains, taking long detours for short hot-spring breaks. Near Pistoia I was overtaken by the women's tour d'Italia, I was fixing a slow on a grassy verge, drying my laundry on a bush when the sirens started screaming and 50+ female cyclists in pink and black lycra threw themselves up the mountain, a rush of support vehicles, T.V crew, adoring crowds, I hoped I wasn't caught on T.V. I spent an afternoon with the Morandi's in Bologna then watched the grape harvests come in while cycling through Emiglia Romagna. I was in a childishly artificial state of hyper-sensitive, over-excitement by the time I got to the Tempio Malatestiano. When I arrived, the Agostino di Duccio reliefs were roped off. The reliefs sit in six chapels, around the main nave of the church, leaning over the velvet rope it was only possible to see the front facing reliefs completely, the others were partially obscured in the darkness, or completely invisible through their positioning. I asked the elderly verger if I might be able to go and look at the Agostino reliefs properly, he refused me entry, 'you must gain permission from the cardinal 2 weeks in advance'. This was not mentioned on the website and I had to leave Italy the next day. I pleaded, I spoke of my pilgrimage, of how important the reliefs are to me, but he wouldn't relent, I asked a priest who said that he also didn't have the authority to allow me access. I was told that this was a conservation issue, that if I was allowed in, then everyone would want to see the chapels. This seemed unlikely to me, the chapels containing a Giotto painting and Piero della Francesca fresco were much more popular and allowed unrestricted access. I began to wonder if there was something that they didn't want me to see. Through prior repeated study of reproductions of the reliefs in the church I was able to identify most of the pieces and could make out their shapes in the half lit blur, if not their splendour. Saturn eating his children, an enormous crab suspended threateningly over an aestheticised medieval Rimini, angels hitching up their skirts to reveal the eroticised tomb of Isotta, the mistress of the warlord holding the purse-strings, Hercules and Mars flex their muscles, History, Rhetoric, Poetry are scantily clad maidens who seem to be dancing. Elephants and stylised roses abound (representing our generous lord and master). Dolphins with razor sharp teeth carry fat putti over the doors. The insignia and portrait of Sigismondo Malatesta interwoven with those of Isotta cover every surface. All the women in the church have the same face, Stokes speculates that this pig-faced creature must be Isotta or they would have used a more conventional beauty, I think the woman depicted is extremely beautiful. I went to confession in one of the Agostino chapels so got to see some of the ugly, leering, threatening cherubins in these unholy reliefs up close before my hastily mistranslated sins were forgiven by a slightly confused priest.

Outside in the town, the season was winding down. Mile after mile of privatised pay per pitch beach boarded up for the winter. The town's hostels filled with self-help business disciples who had travelled from all over Europe to learn how to make themselves highly effective people. Rimini is a bit like a bigger, even more depressing version of Bognor Regis (it is as hard to imagine Giotto painting there as it is Joyce writing Finnegan's Wake above a decrepit chippy in Bognor). I found a bed in a room full of monkish business affectionados and returned to the Tempio Malatestiano in the morning, hoping to be let into the chapels properly but was chased off again by the verger without apology. I stomped around stubbornly, he clearly thought I was making the place look untidy for the more respectable looking package tourists.

A walking tour around the Tempio Malatestiano, It was noon, unbearably hot on a mid-september day, the facade of the church, a very pure white marble, pink veined in places, an enormous, blank-eyed building with classical proportions.  The facade, designed by Alberti, carved elaborately with wild looking briars (a rose is hardly an appropriate name for these monstrous, rugged looking plants), elephants and the initials of Sigismondo Malatesta and Isotta degli Atti.  In the bright sunshine it almost hurt to look at the church straight on.  In Pound's faked ledger the slabs for the facade of the church were stolen tombstones, the original décor factored into the design, I could see no concrete evidence of this when looking at the front of the church, perhaps acid rain has hidden these ancient crimes.  There is a plaque in the square outside the church to the martyrs of Rimini, a fascist massacre took place there.  The church is large and has an air of being little used, though the brightly coloured adverts stuck to the pin board in the entrance attempt to convince that this is still a lively community, united in worship.  Around the grand, almost empty nave sit the 7 chapels.  The chapel to the left, on entering, houses Sigismondo's tomb and a memorial to the Malatesta ancestry.  This chapel is all orange and black stone it is heavy and masculine, a pair of decapitated elephants trumpet enthusiastically from the warlord's tomb, the entrance to the chapel is a balustrade made up of cherubins for fenceposts, Agostino's work, they are not very cute at all but rather squat, leering, malevolent little beings.  The next chapel down is the chapel I snuck into for confession, filled with more of Agostino's grim-faced cherubins, who in no way resemble real children, playing childhood games with an incontrovertible look of sexual knowing, by today's standards these reliefs are really dirty, this is the chapel where Sigismondo Pandolfo's other wives are buried, he is said to have poisoned the first with an emerald cup and strangled the second with a napkin at the dinner table.  Then a chapel with allegorical Agostino reliefs, History, Poetry, Rhetoric, Science, Art, Literature (as I remember it) shown as beautiful, scantily clad women, classical dress, pagan hairstyles frolicking over the walls, dancing, singing, playing musical instruments.  Could this be where Aby Warburg's fixation with a haircut comes from?  These images are frenzied, a Dionysian revelry is no great leap of faith when watching these muses dance.  Then we move on to a chapel with two large gory Vasari paintings, I can't remember what of, pools of dark blood, upturned eyes, dying ecstasy, these would have been commissioned in a later phase of the church's decoration, I can't imagine Sigismondo signing a cheque for an artist like Vasari, anyway Siggy darling was long dead by then.  The crucifix in the central recess, above the alter is an especially lovely Giotto painting, then there is a door to an office where a robed priest stamps papers (he didn't have the authority to stamp mine).  On the right hand side of the church, working backwards from the alter, the first chapel holds the Piero della Francesca fresco of Sigismondo in full military regalia kneeling before St Sigismondo, his namesake, from this portrait Sigismondo's face in profile is recognizable on every other surface in the church.  Then, we come to my favourite chapel, the zodiac, ancient heros and gods writhe alongside the stars.  Then, two ornate doors with possessed looking putti riding snarling dolphins and finally the gloriously over the top tomb of Isotta, back at the entrance of the church, opposite the tomb of Sigismondo clouds of white marble, can can dancing angels, a pouting sculpture of the deceased all borne on the back of two large elephants, realistically rendered.  The balustrades and railings between the chapels are all carved with briars, initials and insignia.

Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne, pl. 25 Agostino di Duccio's reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini looks almost exactly like my studio wall. My images taken from the Stones of Rimini chart an associative visit to the church, arranged as I remember seeing them, things lost in the half-light of the church repeated, stressed in the studio display. Unconsciously influenced by Warburg through a string of obscure influence? I like to think that this form of display is simply an appropriate way to behave when faced with something simultaneously obscure and obscene, an attempt to work out a positioning for one's own body within the fray. An automatic channelling of a Dionysian revelry. Warburg speaks of the Tempio Malatestiano as the place where classical movement was reanimated in the renaissance. A breaking point of sedimented instability, a place where gesture and memory become reanimated as something with an urgency. Aby Warburg's mnemosyne atlas plate starts to reconstruct a visit to the Tempio Malatestiano, the top line shows images of the church to put the Agostino reliefs in context, we then start to travel through the chapels, the images arranged associatively, reconstructing the mental processing of the site, an indication of the physicality of the space, an image with the same wandering methodology that Stokes and Pound employed. I was thrilled but unsurprised to stumble across Agostino in Phillip Alain-Michaud's Warburg biography. The curl of a lock of hair, a serpentine gesture, this tension handed down, becoming a re-animation of an antique dance in the renaissance. Warburg fully understood the potential trauma involved in this frenzy, elsewhere he talks of “A wild chase, with scenes of orgaistic cannibalism...daemonic undercurrents burst through the thin veneer of Christianity, Catholicism, and courtly culture” this is not an idealised view of some benign neo-classical cult. Sigismondo Pandolfo was a disciple of Gemistus Pletho, a scholar who advocated the return of the Olympus gods, a true return to polytheism under the classical model. Sigismondo's armies stole Gemistus Pletho's remains, bringing them to the Tempio Malatestiano where a tomb was built to house them. QUOTE !!!! The gods depicted in the Agostino reliefs, the importance of cosmology at the Tempio Malatestiano isn't a stand in, but a statement of political urgency, the court being built up, Sigismondo's humanist library seem like a genuine attempt to reanimate the ghosts of antiquity. The lock of hair, the gesture were Warburg's key into the dance, there is a lot at stake here, bound in these formal concerns.

Fragment from Pisan Cantos

The Pisan Cantos were reconstructed from memory. After the war Pound was detained at a detention camp near Pisa, accused of treason for the radio broadcasts he made on Italian radio during the war. He was put in an open-air cage which were called death cells, open to the elements, the sun, rain, dust, a strong light left on all night, a concrete floor, no books, the guards instructed not to talk to him. After 3 weeks the camp doctor made a report stating that Pound was having a breakdown and that these conditons continued, would cause, if not death, then a serious deterioration in his condition. He was moved into a tent in the military compound, given a proper bed and shelter. He was able to use the typewriter there in the evenings, over the 5 month period of his detention in the camp he wrote the Pisan Cantos. He had a poetry anthology and his copy of Confuscius there apparently but very limited access to the material he referenced. An exercise in mental time travel. He reconstructed his impression of the world, of history in memory. I've always found it particular that the Pisan Cantos seem to have such a strong material connection to the site. Now I know the conditions in which they were written this makes sense. I think that it is a walk around the Tempio Malatestiano in memory that become the thing which fixes the image of a character, that gives Sigismondo his voice, directly from the stone of the Church. EXPAND!!!The patterning of the cantos finds affinities between subjects rather than sound rhymes. An insiduous repetition providing other ways to navigate a history of the world.

So that in the end that pot-scraping little runt Andreas Benzi, da Siena Got up to spout out the bunkum That the monstrous swollen, swelling s. o. b. Papa Pio Secondo Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini da Siena Had told him to spout, in their best bear's greased latinity; Stupro, coede, adulter, homocidia, parricidia ac periurnus, presbitericidia, audax, libidinosus, wives, jew-girls, nuns, necrophiliast, fornicarium ac sicarium, proditor, raptor, incestuosus, incendinarius, ac concubinarius and that he rejected the whole symbol of the apostles, and that he said the monks ought not to own property and that he disbelieved in the temporal power, neither christian, jew, gentile nor any sect pagan, nisi forsitan epicureae. Ezra Pound Pisan Cantos

Sigismondo's darkest hour, the moment when the Pope slanders him in preparation for a crusade against him. The cantos written by Pound in the military detention centre focus on the total collapse of Mussolini's regime, on the failed Fascist experiment. Mussolini cast as Sigismondo's natural political heir. Picking over the literary archive gathered in Fascist Italy, over his economic obsession, the blinkered view that fascism is the vehicle for his economic ideas. Views are split on the Pisan Cantos, some think it incoherent, uttlerly disgusting, Robert Frost said: Quote !!! the critic Hugh Kenner states that there is almost nothing in the Cantos that would suggest that it's author in on charge for treason, though the landscape is Italian Pound has returned in memory to London, to the ghosts of the Avant garde circles he was a part of there and left behind him. When I began reading the Cantos Pound was some kind of pantomime baddy for me. Locked in the purile idea that the poet is the protagonist, I read the insistance on a masculine heroics, the parallels drawn between Sigismondo as enlightened despot and Mussolini horrifying. On reading and re-reading it becomes clear that Pound is reviving past voices, speaking through them, the links between the points of reference in the library are much more associative than I was allowing for, though the poet explicitly identifies with these characters. Language pushed through the mangle of ancient song, modernist writing in dead poetic forms. The images thrown up are extremely violent, when Pound was awarded the Bollinger prize for the Pisan Cantos Robert Frost, called it "an unendurable outrage" and Pound "possibly crazy but more likely criminal.

When I began writing about the Tempio Malatestiano I thought of it as a stage, a set, a theatre of sorts. A container for many dramas. A place where the traces of the Florentine Intermedi live on. Poetry and sculpture added up don't make theatre. I've sat through a radio play depicting Pound going mad, a liberty I don't want to take with Pound, Warburg or Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. I'm quite happy for these voices to sit in the Tempio Malatestiano as gossip, a vocabulary around the place is infected with the terminology of these voices.

Stupro, coede, adulter, homocidia, parricidia ac periurnus, presbitericidia, audax, libidinosus, wives, jew-girls, nuns, necrophiliast, fornicarium ac sicarium, proditor, raptor, incestuosus, incendinarius, ac concubinarius and that he rejected the whole symbol of the apostles, and that he said the monks ought not to own property and that he disbelieved in the temporal power, neither christian, jew, gentile nor any sect pagan, nisi forsitan epicureae. As the Pope damns Sigismondo to hell, as he is excommunicated for heresy and dissidance through the mouthpiece of Sidge's standard bearer Ezra Pound we build a convincing fiction about the site. The chapel designed as a continuation of love rhymes for Isotta, her tomb a keystone in the fictionalised seduction.