Savonarola

I mentioned San Marco in the last post.

The Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola came to San Marco in 1490 and began preaching about the coming apocalypse, which he saw as imminent. It was a bad time for Florence - the Medicis were losing their grip; the French king would soon invade Italy and do battle with several city states, including Florence. Savonarola interpreted the chaos - and the decline in living standards for the middle class and poor - as a sign from God. He railed against Florentine decadence, including homosexuality, which was tolerated especially in the upper ranks of society.

Turning against the Medicis, who'd once been his patron, he essentially became the leader of the city when the French attacked and the Medicis were forced into exile in 1494. Among other things, he organized a burning of what he termed pornographic art in the Piazza della Signoria. (The main and most important town square, outside city hall. That's where the Uffizi is today. The episode is usually called a 'book burning' but books were no where near as plentiful in 1494 as the term suggests.) Under Savonarola's influence, sodomy became a capital offense.

Though the government of the city had been elected, the people eventually revolted, and after a riot in 1497, Savonarola was arrested, 'tried', and burned at the stake in a fire that lasted several hours, as the authorities sought to reduce every bit of his remains to ashes so there'd be no relics for his followers.

But Savonarola's memory was not stamped out. His portrait, disguised with the attributes of another Christian martyr but recognizable to his followers, was added to paintings by Fra Bartolomeo. The movement to redeem his reputation continues to this day; there is currently a struggle between different factions in the Catholic Church on whether or not Savonarola should be canonized at a saint or not. (Some of Bartolomeo's work, masterful in its own right, is on display at San Marco. And just for the record, I'm way over-simplifying the complicated politics, which involved the popes as well as the Medicis and French king, responsible for Savonarola's rise and fall.)

The Medicis eventually returned to power. As religious as Italy can seem at times, strict religious puritanism has never had mass appeal here.

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