Savonarola, Girolamo (1452-1498)

Dominican friar and 'martyr', was born in Ferrara, the son of a prominent and scholarly doctor. After a sudden conversion he entered the monastery of S. Domenico in Bologna in 1475 and acquired sufficient fame as a theologian and preacher to be transferred first during 1482-85 and again in 1490, this time at the request of Lorenzo de' Medici, to San Marco in Florence, where he became prior in 1491. Prominently associated, as a preacher of ever-increasing political frankness and emotional power, with attacks on the materialism and misuse of authority by the Medici (though he had been called to Lorenzo's death-bed), his support was welcomed by the party calling for a broadly based republican constitution on Piero de' Medici's exile in 1494.

As the party's most prominent unofficial spokesman he shared the odium it incurred for its failure to recover Pisa after that city's revolt in 1495 and the alliance with France, which left the city politically and economically isolated - a predicament worsened by Savonarola's personal vendetta against Pope Alexander VI. To political opposition (further provoked by Savonarola's continuing to preach after his excommunication) was added a revulsion against the atmosphere of moral crusade which he had persuaded Florence's citizens to adopt in fulfilment of a divinely-appointed role in the purification of Italy as a whole from personal sin and clerical corruption. From being the great inspirer of Florence's self-confidence at a time of dislocating change and great danger, he became first its nagging conscience then its scapegoat. When in 1498 the government joined the Church in wishing to be rid of him, there was little difficulty in establishing (with the aid of torture) the charges of heresy which led to his being hanged and then burned.

This martyr's death, his puritanical drives against gambling and the innuendoes of carnival songs, his bonfires of vanities (already familiar symbols of public contrition), his austere attitude to the uses to which religious art should be put, the contemptuous contemporary description of his most uncritical followers as piagnoni (snivellers): these can obscure the extraordinary range of his following and the reasons for it. His personality had charm as well as power. His erudition, neither profound nor original, was broad enough to interest humanist scholars like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He was an efficient and effective prior of S. Marco and his statesmanlike dignity outside the pulpit led him to be chosen twice as ambassador to the invading Charles VIII.

Though probably always speaking with a Ferrarese accent, he wholly identified himself with the Florentines, flattering them while scolding them. He reinforced the smouldering folk-belief that they had been marked by God for a special destiny; that, while princely rule was in theory best, their intelligence required, exceptionally, a free constitution. He modified his earlier, gloomy eschatology to portray a millennium which would leave the Florentines purified, but able to pursue their familiar lives with God's blessing. His sermons, combining calls to repentance with comments on constitutional affairs, had a power to disturb and fascinate that can be vividly recaptured from those that were taken down in shorthand or published from his notes. Though the ashes of his pyre were thrown into the Arno, his ideas surfaced as one of the chief inspirations behind the Last Florentine Republic of 1527-30, when it once again declared Christ King of Florence.

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