Death in Florence: the Medici, Savonarola and the Battle for the Soul of the Renaissance City

by Paul Strathern

  This passage is interesting on several counts. If even the small-time apothecary was aware that history was being made, and that an era had passed, then a large section of the population must have been aware of this too. Thus a sizeable portion of the citizenry of Florence would now have been mentally prepared for change, and perhaps even expecting it.

  At one in the morning, just hours after Lorenzo the Magnificent had died, his body was borne aloft and carried down the road to Florence in a solemn procession accompanied by lighted flares. On reaching the city walls, the Porta San Gallo was opened and the body borne to the monastery of San Marco, where next day the citizens of Florence would file past to pay their last respects. Although the Medici considered San Marco ‘our house’, as prior of this monastery Savonarola must certainly have been consulted in advance about this – further evidence, it would seem, of a certain reconciliation between Savonarola and the Medici. Lorenzo’s body lay in state for a day and a half, and during the afternoon of 10 April it was carried on the short journey to the Church of San Lorenzo, the traditional burial place of the Medici. This funeral procession advanced down the Via Larga, past the Palazzo Medici and around the corner to San Lorenzo, with the draped coffin followed by the gonfaloniere, the Signoria and all the foreign ambassadors. Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and Ficino would all have been present, as would the painters Botticelli and Michelangelo, as well as Lorenzo’s supporters amongst the leading families, such as the Soderini, Vespucci, Rucellai and Valori, and less savoury figures like his financial fixer Miniati. Amongst the crowds would have been Landucci, Machiavelli and the nine-year-old Guicciardini. The people of Florence lined the streets, watching in silence as the sombre tolling church bells rang out over the city rooftops.6 However, what they actually thought as the coffin of ‘il Magnifico’ passed in front of them remained a secret behind their silent, staring faces. How many of them genuinely mourned Lorenzo’s passing? How many were secretly relieved to see the last of the ‘tyrant’ who had been so publicly decried and condemned by Savonarola? According to some sources, the entire city mourned the passing of Lorenzo the Magnificent, much as his death was mourned by the pope, as well as by rulers throughout Italy and beyond; according to others, only his immediate family, his intellectual circle and the grateful members of the Medici mafia were genuinely moved.

  Contrary to the rosy report of Guicciardini, a view supported by Machiavelli, that ‘the people of Florence were living in great prosperity until 1492’, there are indications that some citizens had begun to suffer from a decline in the wool trade. This had become inevitable when the English, for so long the suppliers of wool to Florence, had begun to process and dye their own wool at source. The rich banking families, the merchants and small traders such as Landucci may all have benefited from the wave of ‘great prosperity’, but this had not filtered down to the precariously employed wool-combers and wool-dyers – the so-called ciompi.fn1

  Even the surface prosperity alluded to by Guicciardini and Machiavelli remains problematic. It certainly existed: this was a major period of the Renaissance, with considerable spending on painting, sculpture and architecture (whilst Lorenzo was not alone in his spending on jewels and rare manuscripts). Yet this must somehow be squared with the assessment of de Roover, the major economic historian of the Medici bank:

  It is now generally accepted that the last decades of the fifteenth century were not a period of great prosperity, but witnessed a depression which was both lasting and profound. It played havoc with the Florentine economy and was certainly in part responsible for the straits of the Medici Bank.7

  Yet how is it possible to reconcile this assessment with the fact that a number of merchant families – most notably that of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici and his brother Giovanni – made their fortunes during just this period? Admittedly, this other branch of the Medici family accumulated much of its wealth through overseas trade, with Spain and the Low Countries. Yet some merchants undeniably prospered through internal trade with Milan, Rome, Naples and Venice.

  One way to resolve these apparently opposing views of the Florentine economy is to accept that, in their different ways, both were true. The gap between rich and poor widened considerably during these years. An indication of this can be seen in the large numbers of the poor who began turning to religion – the trend so perceptively utilised by Savonarola. Well before the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, an increasing number of Florentines seem to have been filled with a sense of apprehension about the future and turned to the Church for guidance. This came to a climax in the weeks during his final illness. On 5 April 1492, three days before Lorenzo’s death, Landucci recorded that in the cathedral during Lent ‘a sermon is preached every day now, with 15 thousand people listening’.8

  These were not sermons by Savonarola, though. He was at this time preaching at the smaller Church of San Lorenzo, where – without actually breaking his covert pact with the Medici – his sermons nonetheless remained highly inflammatory, to say the least, and became the talking point of many in Florence. Just three days after Lorenzo’s funeral had taken place in the very church where Savonarola was preaching, a letter written by Niccolò Guicciardini, an older relative of the historian, told how ‘Each morning in his sermon Savonarola insists upon repeating how all mankind shall suffer the scourge of God … and this very morning I am told he said that God had passed judgement, so that nothing can now save us.’9 A week later, on Good Friday, Savonarola described a vision that he experienced – the second of his great visions, which was in its own mysterious way as vivid as the apocalyptic imagery of his bloodthirsty revelation at Brescia. The vision revealed to him:

  a black cross which stretched out its arms to cover over the whole of the earth. Upon this cross were inscribed the words ‘Crux irae Dei’ [The Cross of the Wrath of God]. The sky was pitch black, lit by flickers of lightning. Thunder roared and a great storm of wind and hailstorms killed a host of people. The sky now cleared and from the centre of Jerusalem there appeared a gold cross which rose into the sky illuminating the entire world. Upon this cross were inscribed the words ‘Crux Misericordae Dei’ [The Cross of the Mercy of God], and all nations flocked to adore it.10

  Surprisingly, this vision had not come to Savonarola during some fervent night of prayer in the solitude of his monastic cell. Years later, in his written version of his revelations, he would claim that he had seen this vision whilst he was in the midst of delivering his sermon, and merely described it to the congregation as he saw it.fn2 One can but imagine the intensity of this experience and Savonarola’s description of it, as well as the effect this must have had on his listeners.

  But what did this latest revelation mean? Savonarola refused to be drawn on this topic, and for days afterwards Florence remained rife with speculation. Over two weeks later, a leading citizen wrote in a letter concerning this latest sensation: ‘All of Florence is trying to work out what his prophecies are about.’11 We can only speculate, but it seems evident that Savonarola’s revelation was but a further elaboration of his theme concerning the scourge of God, and how this wrath would strike the Church in Rome, whilst all those who remained faithful to the original word that Christ had preached in the City of Jerusalem would receive God’s mercy.

  The first tyrant whose death Savonarola had predicted, that of Lorenzo the Magnificent, had duly taken place. Then word reached Florence that on 25 July Innocent VIII had died in Rome. The second of Savonarola’s three ‘prophecies’ had come true. Only King Ferrante I of Naples remained alive, and rumour had it that he too was now ill. The murmurs amongst the people of Florence began to grow. How could Savonarola possibly have known that such things would come to pass, unless he was indeed a true prophet, receiving word directly from God?

  The answer to this lies in the original report of the prophecy that he made in mid-1491 in the sacristy of San Marco to the delegation sent to him by Lorenzo the Magnificent, a prophecy that was overheard by a number of onlookers. Villari
’s collation of their firsthand reports decribes how Savonarola ‘began to speak about the city of Florence and the political state of Italy, displaying a depth of knowledge in these matters which astonished his listeners’. In this sense, Savonarola was undoubtedly a very worldly monk, who kept himself well abreast of the latest political developments in Florence, throughout Italy and beyond. In the absence of newspapers, for the most part word of events passed from city to city by way of regular diplomatic reports, as well as news from visiting merchants and travellers. A good number of such travellers were educated monks, passing between monasteries. Dominicans would regularly have arrived at, or passed through, the monastery of San Marco in Florence, bringing with them informed opinion of the latest developments in the cities through which they had journeyed. Under such circumstances, Savonarola would certainly have been aware that Innocent VIII was seriously ailing, that the degenerate seventy-one-year-old King Ferrante of Naples was also not long for this world, and of course he already knew that Lorenzo the Magnificent had been striken with a possibly terminal bout of his congenital affliction. Indeed, many of the more informed members of Savonarola’s congregation would have found little exceptional in his ‘prophecy’ concerning these three tyrants. Others in Florence, more credulous and less informed, would certainly have found such ‘revelations’ about the fate of the great men of their time sensational.

  But there was a further factor at work here, which had already won over many of the more informed listeners to his sermons – including exceptional intellectuals like Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano and even, to a certain extent, the dedicated Platonist Ficino.

  It is Michelangelo who hints at Savonarola’s true power. The teenage Michelangelo had honed his sculpting skills in the garden set up by Lorenzo the Magnificent close by the monastery of San Marco. Here Michelangelo had spent many long hours painstakingly copying the fragments of classical sculpture collected by Lorenzo. In the midst of his labours he would hear Savonarola preaching to his novices and fellow friars beneath the damask rose-tree in the monastery garden across the street, an experience that he would never forget. Michelangelo’s character had been imbued with a profound spirituality from his earliest years, and he soon found himself listening intently to what Savonarola was saying. But more than this, Michelangelo found himself so enchanted by the manner in which the friar spoke that more than sixty years later he would confide to his favourite pupil Ascanio Condivi that ‘he could still hear [Savonarola’s] living voice ringing out in his mind’.12

  There can be no doubt that by the time Savonarola returned to Florence and became prior of San Marco he had become an exceptional preacher. He had learned how to project his voice so that it resonated in precisely the most effective manner through any church interior, from the chapel of San Marco to the vast echoing space beneath the dome of Florence Cathedral. He had also learned to tone down his thick Ferrarese vowels, which pronounced the soft Tuscan ‘g’ as if it was a ‘z’ (similar to the Venetian dialect, which is spoken and can be seen on signs in the city to this day). Referring in a sermon to the Bargello (the palace of justice) as the ‘Barzello’ would only have evoked smirks all round in church, and would have been mimicked amongst the people to ridicule him. No, the siren song that would remain in Michelangelo’s mind for ever, and which so entranced the fine minds of the intellectuals and so swayed the common people, must long since have ironed out such risible flaws. This would have been a conscious process undertaken by Savonarola, which must have been carried out during his preaching tours of northern Italy after he first departed from Florence, when his sermons had proved such a failure that he had determined to give up preaching altogether. During his later preaching tours through the cities of northern Italy – all of which had their own highly distinctive dialect and accents – he must have had to adapt his voice so that it was both comprehensible and lacking any quaint colloquialisms or comic idiosyncrasies. This he could have done by trying out various different accents and assessing their effects.13

  In those peripatetic years, Savonarola would not have known that he was to return one day to Florence, but he would have been aware that the Florentine dialect was in the process of becoming accepted throughout Italy as the national language. Dante may have played his part in instigating this in the previous century by writing his Divine Comedy in Tuscan dialect, but the process had been assisted by his two great literary contemporaries Boccaccio and Petrarch, who had also chosen to write in the Tuscan dialect of their native region rather than in the more usual scholarly Latin. The Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s racy tales and Petrarch’s love sonnets had spanned the entire gamut of literature, with their works proving so popular to readers of all tastes that the educated classes throughout Italy had soon become proficient in this Tuscan dialect. By the following century it would have been more or less comprehensible throughout northern Italy, where Savonarola (in common with other travelling preachers who delivered sermons to lay congregations) chose to preach in this version of Italian so that he had a better chance of being understood by as many as possible amongst his audiences. This combination of circumstances had meant that by the time Savonarola returned to Florence three years later he would have been fluent, and fully at ease, in the Tuscan dialect, the growing Italian language.

  Another point to be borne in mind was that the sermon was invariably the main feature of a contemporary service, especially in Lent and at Advent, when there would be a series of them, delivered as often as not on a daily basis. Such sermons could draw large crowds and could last anything up to two or three hours. All this involved much more than orthodox preaching. In order to keep his audience attentive for such an extended period, the preacher would be required to put on a lively performance. This would often involve rousing rhetorical questions – which he would then proceed to answer himself. Certain sections of society, certain individuals or even particular members of the congregation who were present in the rows of pews, were liable to be singled out. Social types or modes of behaviour would be held up to scorn – often involving mimicry, to comic effect. Local events would be commented upon, and favourite devices such as irony (usually heavy), parody and forthright humour were frequently employed. As was polemic, often extended and rising to passionate invective flights or descending to plain harangues. But such methods were usually employed as a mere device to warm up the congregation, to involve all its disparate individuals. Then would come the most frequent and effective oratorical device: the invocation of mortal fear, which would be exploited to its ultimate degree – fear of death, fear of God’s wrath, fear of hell-fire and all its torments.

  Savonarola had become particularly adept at such methods after he had discovered during his Lenten sermons at San Gimignano, six years previously, how apocalyptic revelations could electrify his audience. Initially, he had implied that such revelations were taken from the Bible: the Old Testament prophets and the Book of Revelation. Later he would elaborate upon these, still claiming that they had the backing of the Bible, maintaining that this was the source of his words, even as his imagination extended beyond this source. Only when he became intoxicated with his own powers, to the extent that he began having his own revelations, did Savonarola begin to depart altogether from textural authority and orthodoxy. And it was only then that he had the first inkling that the power he exercised over his congregation from the pulpit could also be extended beyond the church in which he preached.

  Savonarola wished to free his congregation from the corruption that had by now permeated the Church at every level. He wished to return to the simple spirituality of the original Christianity that had been preached by Jesus himself. The austere dedication required for such a life could easily be imposed within the confines of a monastery; it could even be observed by those believers amongst the poor who took his words to heart. And within the sanctified confines of the church, with its harrowing crucifixes, holy scenes and exemplary statues of the saints, many would be inspired to change their lives.
But after the service the congregation would stream out into the bright sunlight of the city piazzas and streets, which remained unchanged in all their worldly glory. Friends would be greeted, news and gossip exchanged. Life would return to secular normality: family closeness and squabbles, the hard daily drudge of earning one’s bread, the little joys and grim disappointments of everyday existence, life ground down by taxes, harsh laws and political masters. If Christ’s words were to be fulfilled in any permanent and meaningful sense, Savonarola knew that his power would have to be extended beyond the confines of the church buildings and out into the streets of Florence.

  Just as Lorenzo the Magnificent had planned, he was duly succeeded by his eldest son, the twenty-year-old Piero de’ Medici. Opinions differ as to Piero and his abilities. Some have regarded him as inept, while others have seen him as talented, but inexperienced. He was a handsome young man, both physically and intellectually gifted. He loved hunting and jousting, but his favourite pastime was the rough-house football known as calcio storico, which took place in the large piazza in front of the church of Santa Croce and was not for the faint-hearted. Much like his father, Piero was well educated, with tutors of the calibre of Poliziano and Ficino, and he also wrote verse, though not as well as his father. In fact, throughout his teenage years he strove hard to emulate Lorenzo. So why did his father secretly concede that of his two sons ‘one is foolish, the other is clever’ – the former relating to Piero?

  During Lorenzo’s twenty-three-year reign the Medici had gradually come into their own as Florence’s first family, with all traditional pretence of modesty cast aside. Lorenzo had not been slow to notice that Piero’s privileged status as his son and heir had encouraged a certain arrogance in his character. This had sometimes led Piero to act impetuously or take rash decisions, in imitation of his father’s fabled and courageous decisiveness (which would certainly have been labelled rash or impetuous, had it failed). It was perhaps inevitable that Piero should have felt an underlying uncertainty concerning his own talents, and a wish to excel in the eyes of his father – or perhaps even outshine him. His arrogance and rashness were merely symptoms of these ambitions and uncertainties.