Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 13, 2025
The date of the Pazzi Conspiracy was 1478. A few years later the same building witnessed the extraordinary effects of Savonarola's oratory, when such was the terrible picture he drew of the fate of unregenerate sinners that his listeners' hair was said actually to rise with fright. Savonarola came towards the end of the Renaissance, to give it its death-blow.
Both Segni and Varchi discerned the exaggerated and therefore baneful influence of Savonarola's prophecies over the populace of Florence. In spite of continued failure, the people kept trusting to the monk's prediction that, after her chastisement, Florence would bloom forth with double luster, and that angels in the last resort would man her walls and repel the invaders.
Still, the days come when he will have no pleasure and plenty of fleas, poor dog, for Savonarola's martyrdom here in Florence is scarcely worse than Flush's in the summer.
But this remark only shows how the stars and the deep blue openings into the heavens, and the manifold suggestions of the towers of Dante's city, and the neighbourhood of Savonarola's cell, affect the imagination and call up comparisons by far too mighty.
Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other, and burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.
The Palazzo Vecchio's ground floor is a series of thoroughfares in which people are passing continually amid huge pillars and along dark passages; but our way is up the stone steps immediately to the left on leaving the courtyard where Verrocchio's child eternally smiles, for the steps take us to that vast hall designed by Cronaca for Savonarola's Great Council, which was called into being for the government of Florence after the luckless Piero de' Medici had been banished in 1494.
A thirteenth-century commentary on Peter Lombard's "Sentences" has marginal notes by Tasso, and a contemporary copy of Savonarola's "Triumph of the Cross" shows on the title page a woodcut of the frate writing in his cell. Bembo's "Asolini" a first edition, contains autograph corrections.
Sorrow and joy have each their peculiar narrowness; and a religious enthusiasm like Savonarola's which ultimately blesses mankind by giving the soul a strong propulsion towards sympathy with pain, indignation against wrong, and the subjugation of sensual desire, must always incur the reproach of a great negation.
We'll go back to our books oh! you have never left them; but I, poor sinner that I am ! Give me my Dante, and let me feel him between my hands! Where is Virgil? Heu! fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum. Is it quoted right? Is it apropos? 'Savonarola's word of fate. 'Then mine too! How have you been so patient with me? A London season and I still have Homer to read!
But, although such resemblance was very distant Savonarola's peculiarly unbalanced countenance being a strong caricature of hers some likeness there was. Her speaking voice was, I think, one of the most beautiful I ever heard, and she used it conscientiously, if I may say so.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking