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Updated: May 13, 2025
Terrible, indeed, must have been the wrestlings and questionings of this strong-fibered intellect, alone and diffident, within the toils of ecstasy. Returning to the details of Savonarola's biography, we find him still in Lombardy in 1486. After leaving Brescia he moved to Reggio, where he made the friendship of the famous Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of his day went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards, dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of Savonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance.
You bring your beauty and your money in your hand, and throw them into the great conflagration of the Cause just as the women did in Savonarola's day. You fling them away if need be for an idea. And because of it, all the lovers of ideas, and all the dreamers of great dreams will be your slaves and servants.
It was the Franciscans he had to meet; whether or no they meant to persist with the "trial by fire" we shall never know, but when, on 7th April 1498, the fire was lighted in Piazza della Signoria, it was Savonarola who refused. A few minutes later, amid the uproar, a deluge of rain put out the flames. Savonarola's last chance was gone.
If Savonarola's studies of the Hebrew prophets inclined him to believe in dreams and revelations, yet on the other hand the strong logic of his intellect, trained in scholastic distinctions, taught him to mistrust the promptings of a power that spoke to him when he was somewhat more or less than his prosaic self. How could he be sure that the spirit came from God?
Tom Coryat, the eccentric English traveler, gives a curious account of the splendor and refinement displayed by the demi-monde of the lagoons, and Marston describes Venice as a school of luxury in which the monstrous Aretine played professor. Of the state of morals in Florence Savonarola's sermons give the best picture. Infessura, p. 1997.
Of Savonarola's career from this time, and the state of Florence up to the day of his death, the two authors here selected give faithful and vivid narratives. In Romola George Eliot portrays the character and acts of this great reformer with a legitimate intensifying, for artistic purposes, of the certified facts of history. The month of November, 1494, began under sinister auspices in Florence.
She had beforehand felt an inward shrinking from a new guide who was a total stranger to her: but to have resisted Savonarola's advice would have been to assume an attitude of independence at a moment when all her strength must be drawn from the renunciation of independence. And the whole bent of her mind now was towards doing what was painful rather than what was easy.
Florence underwent an extravagant though brief religious revival. The monk Savonarola preached against wickedness in high places, and thundered at the Florentines for their presumption and vanity. The impressionable people wept, they appointed a "day of vanities" and laid all their rich robes and jewels at Savonarola's feet. They made him ruler of the city.
That the Church of God required renewal, and that immediately; second, that all Italy should be chastised; third, that this should come to pass soon." This was the first of Savonarola's prophecies, and caused great excitement among the Florentines who heard it.
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