6
SAVONAROLA TOOK UP the post of teaching master at the monastery of San Marco probably some time in early June 1490, delivering lectures on logic to novices and other members of the community. However, he also took to giving extra lectures on Sundays after Vespers, beneath a damask rose-tree in the monastery gardens. In these informal, almost intimate lectures to his fellow friars he began explaining passages from the Bible, resorting to the quiet, intense manner that had always attracted listeners during his more personal teaching. The beauty of the gardens on those long summer evenings, combined with the atmosphere of intense spirituality, soon began to attract devout listeners from beyond the monastic community. He also began receiving regular visits in his cell from Pico della Mirandola, who was now eager to receive religious instruction from Savonarola. As Savonarola would later confess, during their previous meetings he had done all he could to dissuade Pico from pursuing his ambition to create a universal philosophy. Instead, he had tried his best to convince Pico that he should follow his true calling and devote his life to Christianity and the one true God, without further delay. Savonarola had warned him that:
for this delaye I threatened him … he wolde be punished yf he forsook that purpose which our Lorde had put in his mynde, and certainly I prayed to God my selfe (I will not lye therefore) that he might be some what beaten: to compell him to take that waye whiche God had from above shewed hyme.1
Now Pico had indeed been ‘some what beaten’ and was a changed man. He had given away his villa and his estate near Mirandola to his nephew Gianfrancesco, who would later repay this gift by writing the first biography of his uncle. According to Gianfrancesco, during the period around the summer of 1490 Pico conceived the idea of following in the footsteps of St Francis of Assisi, travelling barefoot through the towns and cities of Italy. He was preparing to join the same order as Savonarola, the Dominicans, and devote his life to preaching, but could not yet bring himself to renounce the world entirely, despite the frequent urgings of Savonarola.
All the indications are that Pico and Savonarola spent many hours discussing philosophy. Although Savonarola was undeniably seeking to influence Pico, there are indications that Pico also influenced Savonarola in the course of these discussions. Savonarola was engaged in his lectures on logic, and it was around this time that he conceived of his ‘Division of all the Sciences’.2 This is the nearest he came to providing a purely philosophical underpinning to his belief. Savonarola separated philosophy into two aspects: the rational, and the positive. Positive philosophy included the real and the practical, embracing the moral (ethics, economicsfn1, politics) and the mechanical (the arts). Rational philosophy, on the other hand, embraced logic and the speculative, which included physics, mathematics and metaphysics. Physics was inseparable from matter, mathematics was abstracted from matter, but metaphysics was absolutely free from material constraint, and was thus the queen of the sciences; it strove to discover the highest truth, and in doing so it elevated the human spirit. And as far as Savonarola was concerned, the only metaphysics was theology – Christian theology, as derived from the Bible.
Savonarola’s philosophy was neither original nor particularly clear. For him, philosophy was not important – even so, it certainly illuminated the nature of his faith. The spiritual quest of metaphysics was quite separate from ethics, economics and politics. Yet these latter belonged to the real world, and as such could not be ignored. Savonarola’s regard for his congregations would always involve a deeply compassionate element. Besides being metaphysical, his message was also moral, and as such included ethics, economics and politics. These were not subjects that were open to free discusssion during this period: the Church laid down the law on ethics, and economic life was strictly regulated by the powerful guilds, whilst politics was a matter for rulers. But Savonarola saw these as subsumed by morality, and thus in the realm of real and practical philosophical debate. Society, which included ethics, economics and politics, was moral or it was nothing. And as such, contemporary society was due for a change.
In the light of how many long hours Savonarola and Pico spent discussing philosophy, it is worth comparing their different philosophies. Pico had wished to build a universal philosophy-cum-religion upon 900 basic axioms: these would include all belief systems and all manner of thought, and yet would retain an outlook that was essentially humanistic. It left humanity free to choose what it wished to become, yet urged the use of reason to achieve ‘the higher realms of the divine’. By contrast, Savonarola’s basic axioms were contained in the Bible, and faith alone (aided by the reason of metaphysics, the queen of the sciences) could aspire to the divine. Once Savonarola had convinced Pico that it was right for him to abandon his 900 theses and his reliance upon arguments derived from all religions, the way was open for him to embrace an analogous mode of thought using the Bible and faith. Yet although Pico discarded his philosophy, he did not discard his intellectual powers. His traumatic clash with the pope may have rendered him a changed man, but it had not broken him. He never lost his compelling personal qualities and his supreme ability to reason: he could still discuss philosophy with his intellectual equal, Savonarola. This much was confirmed by Savonarola himself, who was hardly a man to be impressed by such qualities: yet years later, on Pico’s death, the austere friar would pronounce him ‘a man in whom God had heped many great gifts and singular graces, who is an inestymable loss to the church’.3
Savonarola’s first sermon on his return to Florence was delivered on 1 August 1490 in the church at San Marco, just two months after his arrival. He had, it seems, already gained a certain hearsay reputation as a result of his apocalyptic sermons delivered in northern Italy; and this, together with the growing audience for his evening talks in the monastery gardens, ensured an unusually large crowd at San Marco that Sunday. According to Burlamacchi, who might even have been present, some were left standing, while others clung to the iron gratings, peering into the body of the church.
Savonarola did not disappoint the spilling congregation beneath the delicate frescoes and long, echoing nave. He returned to his favourite topic, the Apocalypse, and for the first time in Florence articulated what would become his famous prophecies regarding the Church: its reform, how it would be scourged, and the imminence of these events. In later years he would fondly recall the effect of his sermon with the words: ‘I am the hailstorm that shall smash the heads of those who do not take cover.’4 Such was the popularity of this, and of Savonarola’s ensuing sermons, that when he was chosen by the prior of San Marco to give the Lenten sermons for the following year, it was decided that he should deliver them in Florence’s main church, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo).
By now, word had reached Lorenzo the Magnificent of the disturbing tenor of Savonarola’s preaching. The man brought to Florence to assist the spiritual life of Lorenzo and his son Giovanni, to inspire a new orthodoxy within the court and the populace, had started making subversive prophecies concerning the Church. As a result Lorenzo sent word to Savonarola, by way of a group of leading citizens, that in the forthcoming Lenten sermons it would be best if ‘he did not speak much about future events’.5 But this was not the way to deal with Savonarola: threats only incited him to obstinacy, and worse. He saw them as attempts to compromise his integrity, an element that was central to his faith, his personality, indeed his very being.
Yet Lorenzo the Magnificent was not the only one alarmed by Savonarola’s attitude, and Savonarola himself admitted that he was approached ‘by all kinds of people’6 who warned him against being so reckless. Some of these were young monks at San Marco, amongst whom he had begun to gather a devoted following. Unlike the deputation from Lorenzo, these were not threats, but friendly advice from those he knew to be sympathetic to his cause, and Savonarola decided to take heed of their warning. He set about preparing a series of sermons on more orthodox themes, which he would deliver in a less sensational manner. But he soon found ‘I was unable to do this, because everything that I read or studied was so boring, and when I tried to preach in any other manner than the one I was used to, I even bored myself.’7 He would recall how he had heard a voice encouraging him to return to his former way of preaching: ‘You fool, do you not understand that it is the will of God that you should preach in this way?’8 This ‘voice’ soon persuaded him.
As result, when Savonarola next stepped up to the lectern in the cathedral, he delivered what even he would characterise as ‘a terrifying sermon’9. His voice rang out beneath Brunelleschi’s great dome as he spoke of the coming of ‘a time such as none has ever heard of before’.10 He launched into a long and explicit tirade against the city’s evils, denouncing sodomites ‘who hide not what they are’, murderers ‘who are filled with evil’, gamblers and blasphemers, all of whom were ‘abhorred by God’. He denounced banking as ‘usury’, explained how the rich ‘will suffer great affliction’ and condemned ‘the unjust taxes which are grinding down the poor’. He warned them that ‘the time is nigh when you will be struck down with the sword’. The city would no longer be known as Florence, but as ‘the great den of iniquity’.
The large audience for Savonarola’s Lenten sermons of 1491 included all elements of the city’s population, but especially the poor, who began to know him as ‘the preacher for those in despair’.11 According to his biographer Ridolfi, ‘as a result of this Lenten preaching, Savonarola started to become master, if not of Florence itself, at least of the people of the city’.12
In accord with Florentine tradition, the preacher of the Lenten sermons at the cathedral delivered a private sermon for the gonfaloniere and his eight-man Signoria at the Palazzo della Signoria on the Wednesday after Easter, which this year fell on 6 April. In practice, this would also have been attended by a number of other senior government officials, advisers and counsellors: even so, it would have been a small gathering compared with a sermon in San Marco or the cathedral. We do not know precisely how Savonarola spoke, but his notes for the sermon survive, giving a good indication. He must have found the prospect of preaching in this more intimate atmosphere intimidating. Beginning a little ineptly and provocatively, he compared himself to Christ in the house of the Pharisee, ‘which forces me to be somewhat more subtle and sophisticated than in Church’.13Despite this, he soon launched into a rather more explicit confrontation:
Everything that is good and everything that is evil in this city depends upon the man who rules it. He is the one responsible for all that is wrong with this city, for if he acted in the proper manner the entire city would be sanctified. Tyrants never change their ways, and this is because they are arrogant, they thrive on flattery, and refuse to return what they have stolen from the people. They leave everything in the hands of corrupt ministers, listen only to false praise, pay no attention to the poor and only care about those who are wealthy. They require the poor and the peasants to labour ceaselessly for them without being paid proper wages. They expect their ministers to condone this, they corrupt the voters, employ criminal tax-collectors, and thus make it even worse for the poor.
One can but imagine the expressions of outrage on the faces of his distinguished listeners. For many years now, during the years of the Medici ascendancy, the leading citizens who governed Florence had grown unaccustomed to hearing such downright democratic criticism. Savonarola was venturing into dangerous political territory, yet such was his ever-increasing self-confidence that he now went even further. He delivered his final Lenten sermons in the cathedral to a packed congregation, his harsh voice with its homely Ferrarese intonations ringing out over the sea of rapt upturned faces. They were hardly able to believe what they were hearing, but Savonarola could now see beginning to unfold before him the destiny of which he had dreamed. Filled with the Holy Spirit, he felt empowered to inform the gathered citizens of Florence, ‘I believe that Christ speaks through my mouth.’
Word of these latest outrages soon reached Lorenzo the Magnificent, and he was strongly advised to banish Savonarola. But he decided against such a drastic step. There were several reasons for this. According to the contemporary historian Guicciardini, Lorenzo retained ‘a certain respect for Fra Girolamo, whom he considered to be genuinely holy’.15 At the same time, there were other, more worldly reasons for Lorenzo’s lack of decisive action. Just three years previously a preacher named Fra Bernardino da Feltre had begun to gain a similar popular following in Florence. Fra Bernadino’s simple innocent sermons, with their homilies on the sanctity of the poor, had evoked widespread sympathy amongst the deprived sections of the population. In this way, he had gained an almost saintly reputation, but his otherworldly manner had not prevented him from making several very worldly observations. He had begun to attack the bankers of Florence for charging such high interest on their loans to the poor that entire families were often plunged into penury for life. As a remedy for this he had suggested the establishment of a Monte della Pietà (in effect, a ‘bank for the people’). Fra Bernardino’s direct honesty had caused the people of Florence to see their rulers through new eyes, and they had not liked what they saw. Lorenzo the Magnificent had quickly sensed how the tide of public opinion was turning against him. Not only amongst the poor, but also amongst the more educated classes, there was a growing dissatisfaction with the Medici regime and the taxes that not only kept the poor in their place, but could also be applied punitively in order to ruin any factions that might be contemplating opposition to Medici rule. Lorenzo had promptly banished Fra Bernardino into exile, but this had proved a highly unpopular move, resulting in widespread dissatisfaction and grumblings, which had taken some time and considerable expense (in the form of bribes and entertainments) to dissipate. Lorenzo was not going to make the same mistake again – especially in light of the irony that he had been responsible for inviting Savonarola back to Florence in the first place. Such a decision would have made him a laughing stock, and would have struck at the very heart of his reputation for decisive action. The great protector of Florence against its enemies could not be seen as a ditherer who went back on his word.
Instead, Lorenzo decided that he would attempt to destroy Savonarola using a more subtle method. He would undermine his reputation as a public speaker by demonstrating that he was not only a dangerous rabble-rouser, but also blasphemous. How could any mere friar claim to speak with the voice of Christ? If Savonarola could be exposed as a charlatan, his following amongst the poor would soon evaporate. More important still, his growing following amongst the humanists would also be destroyed.
As far as this last point was concerned, Lorenzo was at least in part working against himself. His increasing inclination towards religion was grating with his humanist beliefs; he too was attracted to Savonarola’s piety. Indeed, Lorenzo’s latest writing was a religious verse drama about St John and St Paul. Similarly, his close friend Pico had long since succumbed to Savonarola’s siren song, and now even Poliziano was attending his sermons and was on the verge of being won over. The poet would later describe Savonarola as ‘a man eminent both in learning and in sanctity and a superb preacher of heavenly doctrine’.16 Poliziano’s personality was both emotional and intellectual, and he seems to have responded to what he saw as the poetic intensity in Savonarola’s style of preaching. Yet paradoxically it was the friar’s very lack of style that appealed to the poor. Savonarola appears to have been all things to all men. Where Pico had recognised a great intellect, Poliziano recognised the ringing phrases of a poet – and meanwhile the downtrodden were inspired to recognise a man who had their cause at heart. Even the ardent Platonist Ficino was impressed, though at this stage he still had reservations. There appeared to be little place in Savonarola’s creed for much of the pagan philosophy of Plato, which saw the world as the mere play of shadows cast by the distant brilliance of the abstract ideas whose radiance constituted the ultimate reality. Such ethereal Platonic idealism would have been of little consolation to the poor. Yet curiously, Savonarola was in fact inspired by Plato, almost certainly through the influence of Ficino’s writings, a fact that would not have escaped Ficino when he read Savonarola’s words:
The ultimate aim of man is beatitude. This does not consist, as the natural philosophers would have us believe, in the contemplations of speculative science. Nay, beatitude is the pure vision of God. In this life we are only capable of seeing a distant image, a faint shadow of the beatitude. Only in the next life can we enjoy this vision in all its radiant reality.17
Pico, Poliziano and Ficino would all have recognised Savonarola’s philosophical reference. Likewise, the power and clarity of this image would have been easily understood by the less educated amongst his congregation. Savonarola’s words seemed to fill some emptiness that lay at the heart of the society he was addressing. For all the surface aesthetic changes which the Renaissance had brought to the city – architecture, frescoes, festivals, humanism and its discovery of the pagan classical world – this transformation had brought with it a certain spiritual malaise; at the same time, perhaps inevitably, it had also awoken dormant fears. It was this malaise, and these fears, that Savonarola addressed.
Lorenzo the Magnificent, increasingly racked by gout, sensed that he was now dying. The mortal man faced with death responded to the absolutism of Savonarola’s call to faith. But the man who had ruled Florence so successfully for more than two decades knew that Savonarola posed a political threat – to the stability of the city and all that it stood for as the leading cultural centre in Italy, as well as to his own rule, the Medici family and all that they stood to achieve in future generations.
Lorenzo’s plan to undermine Savonarola was an ambitious and subtle one, which could only have been achieved by one man: Fra Mariano da Genazzano, the superior of the local Augustinian order. Where Savonarola harked back to a past era, Fra Mariano was very much a man of the coming age – a preacher of considerable sophistication and intellect.
Despite Savonarola’s growing popularity, Fra Mariano held, and jealously guarded, the title of the most celebrated preacher in Florence. Some twenty years previously the monastery housing the Augustinians had burned down, whereupon Lorenzo the Magnificent had commissioned Brunelleschi to design a new residence for them just outside the city’s northern Porta San Gallo. The result was a resplendent building with cells for 100 monks and a Renaissance-style church. Lorenzo was particularly drawn to Fra Mariano, and had taken to visiting him at his monastery, where they would discuss the cultural and theological issues of the day. Fra Mariano was well versed in the new Renaissance learning, and saw no contradiction between his role as a monk and his love of pagan classical poetry and philosophy. When Lorenzo retired to one of his country villas during the long, hot summer months, he was in the habit of inviting Fra Mariano to stay with him, and here the Augustinian monk made a favourable impression on Lorenzo’s intellectual companions. Poliziano’s opinion of Fra Mariano was typical:
I have met Fra Mariano repeatedly at the villa and entered into confidential talks with him. I never knew a man at once more attractive and more cautious. He neither repels by immoderate severity nor deceives and leads astray by exaggerated indulgence. Many preachers think themselves masters of men’s life and death. While they are abusing their power they always look gloomy and weary men by setting up as judges of morals. But here is a man of moderation. In the pulpit he is a severe censor; but when he descends from it he indulges in winning friendly discourse … I and my friend Pico have much conversation with him and nothing refreshes us after our literary labours as [sic] relaxation in his company. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who understands men so well, shows how highly he esteems him … preferring a conversation with him to any other recreation.18
Poliziano was equally impressed by his style of preaching, writing to a friend of Fra Mariano’s ‘musical voice, his precisely chosen words, his grand sentences. Then I become aware of his telling metaphors, the way he pauses for effect, and the enchantment of his harmonious cadences’.19 Fra Mariano’s sermons, with their wealth of classical and philosophical allusion, may have owed much to Ficino’s erudite expositions before Lorenzo and his circle, but there was no denying that he was above all else an actor. Besides his graceful flourishes and gestures, he was not above resorting to more histrionic groans and trembling cries to stir the emotions of his less-educated listeners. He too had his following amongst the poor.
Even some of the monks from San Marco went to hear Fra Mariano’s sermons. Savonarola’s admirer and defender Domenico Benivieni could not refrain from telling Savonarola: ‘Father, there is no denying that your doctrine is true, useful and necessary, but your way of delivering it lacks grace, especially when it is so frequently compared to that of Fra Mariano.’20 To this, Savonarola is said to have replied bluntly, ‘Such verbal elegance must soon make way for simple preaching of sound doctrine.’
Fra Mariano had become aware of Savonarola’s growing reputation, and in the spring of 1491 he visited him at San Marco, evidently with the aim of sizing up his rival. He left, assuring Savonarola of his friendship. Around this time Lorenzo the Magnificent suggested to Fra Mariano that he should take on his upstart competitor, and deliver a devastating sermon that would demonstrate the hollowness of his rival’s claims and prophecies, at the same time so humiliating Savonarola that he would be eclipsed once and for all in the public mind. Fra Mariano readily agreed to this, telling Lorenzo that he would deliver his sermon at the Church of Santo Spirito, the priory church of the San Gallo monastery, on Ascension Day, Thursday 12 May 1491. This was the first major date in the religious calendar after Easter, falling forty days later; it allowed sufficient time for the controversy over Savonarola’s Lenten sermons to have died down, and also made it look as if Fra Mariano’s sermon was not some hasty personal response to San Marco’s ‘preacher for those in despair’.
Word of this coming attack was soon passed on to Savonarola, who merely responded by predicting, ‘I shall wax, and he shall wane.’21 By Ascension Day news of this ‘joust’ had spread through Florence, and the crowds that gathered at the San Gallo monastery more than filled its sizeable church.fn2 Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola were also amongst the congregation, together with Lorenzo the Magnificent himself – all of whom were now fully aware of the import of what was taking place. Savonarola’s contemporary biographer and friend, Fra Placido Cinozzi, has left an eyewitness account of what happened. Fra Mariano took as his text Jesus’ reply to his disciples, when they asked him to tell them what would come to pass in the future: ‘It is not for you to know the time, or the seasons.’22 He went on to elaborate that it was sheer nonsense for anyone to pretend to have knowledge of future events, and then launched into a passionate personal attack on Savonarola, labelling him as a false prophet who was responsible for spreading subversive sedition, with the aim of stirring the people of Florence to rebellion. But Fra Mariano had evidently misinterpreted what Lorenzo the Magnificent wished of him, for he soon became so carried away with himself that he began mimicking Savonarola’s brusque gestures and provincial accent, before unleashing a stream of intemperate insults against Savonarola, calling him a worm, a snake, a clown who was ignorant of the Bible, and an inept priest who was not even capable of conducting a Mass in proper Latin. By the end of his sermon, Fra Mariano was all but incoherent with rage and vitriolic condemnation. Lorenzo, Poliziano and Pico were horrified at such an inappropriate and vulgar display, and the congregation was deeply shocked. This was not the kind of behaviour Florentines wished to see in church. Even those who had championed Fra Mariano against Savonarola now began to have second thoughts.
Just three days later, on the following Sunday, Savonarola gave his reply in a sermon delivered at the cathedral. Fra Mariano had played into his rival’s hands, and Savonarola intended to take full advantage of this. Using the selfsame text as Fra Mariano had chosen, he proceeded to elucidate its true meaning, disposing one by one of what he claimed were Fra Mariano’s specious arguments against him. He then began a personal attack on Fra Mariano, but unlike his rival’s attack, this was neither intemperate nor insulting. Instead, ‘in the most gentle manner’, he reminded Fra Mariano how just a few days previously he had called at San Marco expressly to see him. Savonarola reminded him how during the course of their meeting Fra Mariano had congratulated him on his sermons, praising their biblical erudition, and assuring him that they would do much good in Florence. Having prepared the ground, Savonarola then began asking some devastating questions: ‘Who was it who made you change your mind? Who was it who suggested that you should attack me?’ All present knew precisely to whom Savonarola was alluding. Not only had his sermon rebutted Fra Mariano, but it had also implicated Lorenzo the Magnificent.
The people of Florence had witnessed the crushing defeat of their celebrated preacher; and Fra Mariano, unable to bear the humiliation, packed his bags and left for Rome, now a lifelong and dangerous enemy of Savonarola who would use all his influence in the Vatican to wreak his revenge. Pico, who had been worried by the turn of events, called upon Savonarola in his cell at San Marco and warned him, ‘You will not fare well, if you continue jousting in this fashion.’24
fn1 Economics as such had not yet come into being: Savonarola’s concern was more with the social effects of commercial activity.
fn2 Neither the San Gallo Augustinian monastery nor the attached church of Santo Spirito exists any longer, for reasons that will become clear in a later chapter.