The essay is structured in nine parts:
1. Georg Swarzenski's extraordinary discovery in 1913 of a masterpiece of
medieval sculpture at the Roman art dealer Giuseppe Sangiorgi. This was the
origin of the fame of the 'Master of Rimini', an artist hitherto unknown.
2. Swarzenski's attempt by to indentify the 'Master of Rimini' with the
artist Gusmin of Cologne, praised by Lorenzo Ghiberti in his Commentarii.
3. Swarzenski's founding of the Liebieghaus Museum in Frankfurt as a
collection of sculptural masterpieces dating from antiquity to the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance.
4. The appropriation of the myth of Gusmin on the part of the Nazi party
and their exploitation of it as political and cultural propaganda for the
Italo-German Axis.
5. The dismissal of the Jewish Swarzenski as director of the Liebieghaus
Museum, and the consequent abandonment of his dream of the myth of the
'Master of Rimini'.
6. After the Second World War, art historians renounce any attempt to
mythologise the 'Master of Rimini'.
7. The theory that the artist emerged from Flemish cultural circles,
advanced by Professor Walter Paatz of Heidelberg University, and
subsequently accepted by all scholars. 8. Drawing on a combination of
archival research and connoisseurship, I demonstrate that the centre of the
Master of Rimini's production was in fact situated on the Mont
Sainte-Geneviève, close to the celebrated University of Paris.
9. The discovery of an unpublished masterpiece by the 'Master of Rimini':
the statuette of a 'Female Saint' in alabaster, conserved in a private
collection in Switzerland.