Scholars have long debated the religious significance of the Renaissance revival of classical antiquity. To what extent did this cultural rebirth pose a challenge to Christian values and beliefs? Anthony F. D'Elia adds an important voice to recent discussions of this question in Pagan Virtue in a Christian World: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance. D'Elia focuses his attention on the vibrant and largely unstudied court culture of Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–1468). Sigismondo was one of fifteenth-century Italy's most renowned mercenary captains and the lord of Rimini, a small city in the Papal States. He was also a devoted student of classical antiquity. On the heels of his greatest military triumphs, Sigismondo welcomed to Rimini humanists, sculptors, painters, and architects to celebrate his accomplishments and shape his public image. The works of art, architecture, and especially literature that they produced lie at the center of this monograph. D'Elia's analysis breaks new ground in several ways. Most of the texts he examines have received only scant scholarly attention. No one before him, moreover, has attempted such a nuanced study of both the literary and artistic dimensions of Sigismondo's court culture. Nor has anyone to date taken up D'Elia's particular line of investigation: a careful scrutiny of the classical image shaped for and by Sigismondo in a decade-long cultural efflorescence at Rimini's court.

The central claim of D'Elia's study is signaled already in the book's title. The literature, art, and architecture of Sigismondo's court are permeated with pagan ideas and ideals—and particularly those of ancient Greece. Sigismondo is celebrated as a Homeric hero, a wrestler poet, and the model of Spartan masculinity. He appears as a pious pagan who himself becomes divine through his battlefield heroics. This omnipresent paganism cannot be dismissed as simply an erudite veneer, D'Elia argues. He repeatedly and convincingly challenges such a reading by demonstrating how pagan features central to Sigismondo's portrait—his craftiness and ferocity in war, his indulgence in erotic love, his glorification as a Greek athlete, and his relationship with the divine—clashed sharply with fundamental Christian beliefs, values, and traditions. So, D'Elia argues, did the pagan elements that dominated Sigismondo's most important artistic commission, the Tempio Malatestiana—a Christian church adorned with sculptures of pagan goddesses, zodiac signs, and the tomb of a pagan philosopher. To use D'Elia's words, Sigismondo's paganism “contaminated” his image as a Christian (280). This contamination was dangerous, and especially so in court poet Basinio of Parma's epic poem, the Hesperis, which purported to celebrate Sigismondo's real exploits on the battlefield. D'Elia does not conclude that Sigismondo was, in reality, a devout pagan, sacrificing cattle at incensed altars (though he does deduce that he did practice astrology). His conclusions center instead on the myth of Sigismondo as a classical hero. Situating it within the era's broader revival of antiquity, D'Elia identifies Sigismondo's court as “more radically classical than any of his contemporaries” (63) and his image as the embodiment of pagan values that Machiavelli would champion half a century later. In so doing, he connects his argument to recent scholarship on fifteenth-century humanism that notes significant tensions between pagan and Christian ideals.

Pagan Virtue in a Christian World is well structured to support its central claims. Before analyzing the image of Sigismondo constructed at his own court, D'Elia surveys and contextualizes the many myths that others created about him from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries. Chapter two offers a different kind of context by exploring how both contemporary Italian courts and ancient Rome served as Sigismondo's models. The heart of the book comes in the four middle chapters. Here, the argument proceeds thematically, illuminating different dimensions of Sigismondo the Greek hero as they emerge in art and still more in literature. The analysis here is grounded in a rich collection of texts, but rightfully focuses on the two most substantial works produced at Sigismondo's court: Basinio's aforementioned epic, the Hesperis, and Roberto Valturio's treatise on the art of war. D'Elia's primary aim is to illuminate how Sigismondo's image was developed in sustained conversation with particular Greek texts and ideals, but his analysis is more ambitious still. He also identifies differences, both subtle and stark, in the image of Sigismondo as he moves from text to text; and he revisits frequently, as a point of comparison, the infamous image of Sigismondo constructed by his archrival, Pope Pius II. In two subsequent chapters, D'Elia explores tensions and criticisms that he finds embedded in the courtly constructions of Sigismondo; and he documents how, despite Pope Pius's attacks, Sigismondo continued to embrace his image as a pagan hero.

The merits of this book are many. Its argument is clear, compelling, and richly illustrated with substantial excerpts from central texts and with well-chosen plates. D'Elia's command of his sources, both ancient and Renaissance, is impressive. So are the results of his project. Through his close attention to the details of Sigismondo's image, he brings into sharp focus the many complexities, anxieties, and possibilities facing humanists in their quest to merge ancient culture with their own. His analysis adds significantly to recent scholarship on the fifteenth-century church and on the dynamics of the Renaissance court. It also gives its audience generous access to texts available only in manuscript or in early printed editions—and in often challenging Latin. That audience should be broad. D'Elia works hard to orient novice readers and to draw them into the action-packed epic and the romantic poetry he discusses. Throughout, he translates his sophisticated scholarship into a wholly engaging style. Some readers may want more comparative analysis to back up the case for Sigismondo's exceptionalism (how does the paganism of the Hesperis compare to contemporary epics celebrating other Italian rulers?). Others might want a fuller discussion of why Sigismondo cultivated such a radically pagan public image given the dangers it posed. But in a book focused on establishing the very existence of that image, these issues, quite reasonably, remain secondary. Indeed, only because D'Elia has advanced such a well-documented argument can we now begin to take up these important questions.