SAVONAROLA.•
SIGNOR VILLARI'S History of Savonarola is so good that it bids fair to be classical. The researches of the author have thrown a flood of light on the dark or doubtful passages of his hero's life. His style has the merits of conciseness and energy which are rare everywhere, and doubly rare in modern Italian literature. A Catholic, an Italian, and a Florentine, writing in the second renaissance of national life, Signor Villari has the special qualification of sympathies and intelli- gence which only fail when the point of view becomes European and transcends local experience. In other words, he seems to us to understand Savonarola perfectly as the man, the monk, and the patriot, and to misapprehend him only in his relations as a prophet to all time. No comparison could be more unfortunate than that which couples the names of Savonarola and Columbus; and no praise more injudicious than that which speaks of the last apostle of asce- ticism as "a standard-bearer of the Renaissance" and "a prophet of modern civilization." Still, when all deductions have been made, the book is sufficiently considerable to do honour not only to its author but to his regenerated country. :Even where Signor Villari's narrative is unfortunately coloured by his theory, lie writes from so full a knowledge, and with such precision, that it is easy for the reader to correct a faulty argument. by the facts given in the text, and the invaluable documents in the Appendix. It is pleasant to think that so temperate a work by a sincere Catholic could not have been pub- lished if Italy had not been set free. It is the literary first-fruits of Solferino and Calatafimo.
At a time when the reactionary press still imputes it as a crime to Italy that it did not consolidate itself in the fifteenth century, it is worth while to glance at the circumstances under which the tyranny of Lorenzo di Medici was possible. The municipal traditions of the Roman Empire, and the physical features of the peninsula, inter- sected by the Apennines, had combined to favour the growth of in- dependent cities. In Tuscany alone there were three—Florence, Pisa, and Siena—any one of which was grander than the capitals of England and France. The churches and palaces then built still tower in almost supernatural beauty over the vulgar or trivial architecture of the last three centuries. Florence alone could send an army into the field ; bad subjugated and garrisoned its rival, Pisa, and was rich in a romantic commerce with the East. Within two centuries and a. half it had produced the greatest European poet, the founder of novelliterature, and the grandest, almost the only, school of art. It is scarcely wonderful if a people whose walls enclosed the house of Dante and the dome of Brunelleschi allowed the glories of their city to obliterate all thought of a common but almost legendary Italian fatherland. The dangers of a divided country were as yet unknown, by experience, and the only head under whom all could have been united was trebly distasteful as a priest, as resident in Rome, and as a possible foreigner. Meanwhile, the growth of a commercial nobility, living within the walls of the town, and yet too weak to establish themselves separately as feudal seigneurs, was undermining the local liberties which had hindered national union. Families like the Strozzi, Pitti, and Soderini, at once contemptuou.s.of their fellow- citizens, ambitious of power, and more ambitious: of display, were prepared to make any sacrifice to the vulgar desire of place and pri- vilege. Incapable of uniting without a head, they succumbed to the strong wills and unscrupulous politics of Cosmo and Lorenzo. di Medici. They accepted despotism, not because it relieved. them from anarchy, but because it gave them a court. Lorenzo understood his mission, half monarch and half lord mayor. He occupied the commons on public buildings, and amused them with holidays and feasts. He fed the eye with noble but voluptuous works of art, and the ear with impure Carnival songs. He drowned opposition at home in blood, and purchased peace abroad with submission and in- famy. It was his peculiar merit to understand literature, and his rare fortune. that the ablest men of letters were then in the market. Florence became the home of a Platonic academy, which reverenced Plato as a saint, and curiously ignored God. The thinkers of the
time, Plotho and Ficiuus, even Pico di Mirandola, produced no single great work, and originated no thoughts that have survived them. Accidentally they prepared the way for reform in demolishing the logic of the schools; but, as Gibbon has well described it, it was " the collision of adverse servitudes." Meanwhile the worst vices of heathen society were rampant among men who affected to be scurrilous like Martial, and vicious like the contemporaries of Petronius.
Jerome Savonarola, born 1452, was the third son of a courtier of Ferrara. The founder of the family had been a physician, and Jerome, a clever boy and a younger son, was destined early in life for the medical profession. To this he owed the advantage of an ex- cellent secular education, which embraced a knowledge of the arts and scholastic philosophy. But accident altered the course of the young man's life. He fell in love with a young girl, the natural daughter of one of the Strozzi, who had taken refuge in Ferrara from some proscription of his party in Florence. The bastard daughter of a patrician rejected the suit of the bourgeois medical student with disdain ; Savonarola's titles to nobility were still unrecognized. In his bitterness, he turned for comfort to thoughts of that other life,
La Stork di Girolamo Savonarola et de Dual Tempi.- Narrate. da Pasquale Villari, oonl'Ajuto di nuovi Doeumentl London: D. Nutt.
in which, as he expressed it, it would be " well known what soul was of gentle lineage." After a year of hard inward struggles, he re-
solved to become a monk (1475). He took his lute and made such
sorrowful music upon it, that his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, in a moment turned pitifully towards him, and said, "My son, this is a sign of departure.' "Two days later the convent gates of St. Dominic in Bologna closed upon the young novice." In the letter which announced his change of life to his father, he declared that " the reason which had decided him was that he could not any longer endure the great corruption of the times, and that he saw vice exalted and virtue cast down throughout all Italy." This abhor-
rence of evil grew with him during seven years' seclusion. The com- pressed fervour of a prophet already fired him, when, in 1482, as war threatened Ferrara, he was sent away for safety to Florence, where the convent of St. Mark's is thenceforth associated with his glory and his life. Almost founded anew by the Medici, it enjoyed their special protection, and had been enriched by them with a large library. The monks seem to have discerned the talent of their new brother, and employed him to preach Lent sermons in Florence and the neighbourhood. In the capital itself he was not at first successful; a brilliant popular preacher threw him into the shade. But in 1486, Savonarola expounded the Apocalypse at Brescia, and, gradually dilating into prophecy, foretold the near approach of. Divine ven- geance upon the city, and described the horrors of a storm. Twenty- six years later, in 1512, there were many living who remembered the preacher's warnings as they suffered the worst fate of the conquered from Gaston de Font's soldiery. But even at the time the success of Savonarola's preaching was Italian. Presently, he had occasion to speak in a chapter of leis Order. at Reggio, and he kindled again with the spirit of Elijah. Among his hearers was the elder Pico di Miran- dole, a gracefill young man of three-and-twenty, but even then learned, and loving truth with the passion of those who die for it. Pico, the friend of Politian and Lorenzo the Magnificent, was Christian in spite of his culture, and.recommended the new teacher to the patron- age of the tyrant of Florence. Savonarola did, not needipatronage; lie was already a power in himself; but the fact that he was courted and vainly courted by the chief magistrate of the city no doubt added to his influence over the vulr. In. 1491. he was chosen prior of St. Mark's. "A stranger," said Lorenzo, bitterly " has come into my house, and; will not even visit me:" Savonarola's first visit was reserved for the usurper's-death-bed. "Is there any mercy," asked the dying man, "for such sins as have committed?" "Three things thou needest," said Savonarola: "to trust heartily in God, to restore the wealth thou hest taken wrongfully, and to set Florence free." As the first two conditions were articulated, Lorenzo had bowed assent ; at the third he scornfully turned, his face from the accuser. Savonarola departed, and the tyrant died unabsolved (1492).
The fall of Lorenzo's dynasty followed quickly upon his death. His degenerate son, Piero, who employed Michael Angelo on a statue of sneers was coarse and violent as well as frivolous, and offended the decorum and courtesy which had survived morals- and liberty in Florence. Revolt was already ripe against him when he went with unnecessary hastiness to conciliate the Freneh, who bad swept down like an avalanche from the Alps, with offers that would have ruined the country he only cared to enslave. In a burst of generous in- dignation, the people declared. him deposed, and drove his family and chief partisans from the city. Savonarola was the first ambas- sador of the new Government. He appeared in. the French camp, and addressed the sickly, half-idiotic king as God's instrument, destined by Heaven to reform the Church, and put an end to the sufferings of Italy. The French readily acquiesced in the announce- ment of their divine mission, but a licentious court, and soldiers flushed with success, did not easily, rise to its level. They entered Florence as conquerors, and tried to impose ruinous terms as the condition of their departure. The firmness of Gino Capponi saved the commonwealth. His threat to ring the city bells and proclaim war intimidated the French,.who were not prepared to risk the un- certain chances of battle in the streets. Charles consented to leave Florence in possession of its old dominion and of its new.liberties.
The question of a constitution was now all important. As the cause of the Medici was irretrievably lost in public estimation, opinion was divided between two models—the Venetian, of a close aristocracy, and one more democratic, resembling the old traditions of the commonwealth. Savonarola had no connexion with the nobility, and no sympathies with the godless patrician culture of the times: With the instinct of a reformer, he felt that his only chance of bringing in the kingdom of Christ was by enlisting the enthusiasm of the lower orders. He succeeded in establishing a grand council of the citizens, which numbered three thousand in all, and was the ulti- mate depositary of power. Unfortunately, this was divided into three sections, each of which was to do duty for the whole in alter- nate periods of six months. The policy of the republic was therefore certain to fluctuate as one or another section came into power, and this instability of purpose was reproduced in the Signoria, or execu- tive magistracy. For a time Savonarola prevailed. The worldly and aristocratic Arrabbiali opposed him in the city, the Medici plotted against him in every part of the peninsula, and the Pope dreaded his prophecies and suspected his reforms. But the personal ascendancy of the man was irresistible. He had put his whole life of suffering and thought into his words, and the city trembled as he preached. Women stripped themselves of their ornaments, merchants gave back their unrighteous gains, and the voice of prayer was heard in the street as- often as in the church. Thus far it was nothing more than an ordinary revival. But the prophet aimed at a more enduring conquest. He desired, in his own city, at least, to destroy whatever divided the heart of man with the Church ; art, learning, and love were proscribed as pitilessly as passion and sin. He wished, as he himself said, to make Florence one great monastery, that it might be better worthy of Christ, whom he had proclaimed head of the com- monwealth. He wrote hymns- to replace the Carnival songs, and would fain have regenerated art by inducing ita disciples to paint the Virgin and saints without form or comeliness. As his success halted behind his wishes, he proclaimed war with the guilty genius of past ages and the Renaissance. Anathema, let them be burned! was the sentence that went forth in solemn earnest against the works of Plato and the pictures of Leonardo da Vinci. Twice during the prophet's time of power was a search for ornaments, books, and works of art carried out by young disciples ; and the poems of Petrarch, the novels of Boccacio, pictures, and even statues, were heaped, along with head-dresses and perfumes, on a great pyre iu the square of the Signoria. Bacio della Porta cast his own works into the flame, and is known thenceforward as Fra Bartolommeo, still an artist, but looking heavenward for inspiration. We regret that. Signor Villari has tried to extenuate this "Burning of Vanities." No doubt it is only an episode in the life of Savonarola, but it is one that paints the man. Between the ascetic and the world there can be no compro- mise. After all, the contents of that pyre—though a merchant offered to redeem them with twenty-two thousand florins —are of little account compared with a single such life as that of Pico di Mirandola, whom a kindred fanaticism persuaded to renounce learning and the world, that he might assume the habit of a Franciscan.
It is scarcely necessary to describe the inevitable fate of enthu- siasm armed with power, and inspired by the terrible logic of one unswerving purpose. Those who have seen the picture of the Re- former, by his great disciple Fra.-Bartolommeo—the glowing eyes, the thin nervous face, and the full passionate lips—will understand that Savonarola was not a mere bloodless saint, who had stepped into life from the canvas of Fra Angelico, but a man of impulse and sym- pathies, whose secret of strength was in the heart rather than in the brain. Two reproaches rest upon his memory. Animated by local patriotism, he opposed the liberties of Pisa, and he is said to have punished bloodily a conspiracy of the Medici, with the fatal hope of perpetuating the republic, as if the stones of his new Church could be laid in blood. Signor Villari, indeed, excuses him as having taken no part in the proceedings; but they were conducted by one of his partisans, and the language of Guicciardini and Machiavel is explicit as to his own consent. Those who sympathize with the man may rejoice that defeat saved him from further perplexities. Suspended from preaching by the Pope, who was then Borgia, with a hostile Signoria in power, and his hold on the people weakened by the mere reaction against all tumultuous excitement, he succumbed to the baser fanaticism of a Franciscan, whose weak brain was kindled by jealousy of the Dominicans, and who challenged him or any of his disciples to walk through fire, that God might give judgment for the right. The people caught at the prospect of a dramatic appeal to Heaven, and the Signoria determined to ruin Savonarola by its issue. They pur- posely interposed delays, which the crowd interpreted to the discredit of. the Reformer. The convent of St. Mark's was besieged, and the prior, with two of his chief disciples, carried off to prison. The hor- rible story of the tortures by which an exquisitely sensitive man was induced to talk at random.and accuse himself, the false accounts of his confession circulated by the magistracy, and the great final scene of the martyrdom, have never till now been adequately told. To those who look back upon it, the most strange feature of all may seem to be that a Papal legate presided over the murder. For, tried as he was by the censures of his superiors, Savonarola died as he had lived, the loyal son of the Church. The genius of mediaeval Catholicism, the spirit of Pacomius and Benedict, had been revived in the man who saw the world in a new era of life, and clung singly to the Cross. The giving up all for Christ was not with him a mere renunciation of home and the gains of a profession, but the sacrifice of music and art, which no man more keenly appreciated, and a breaking of from two thousand years of progress. Philosophy bowed before him in Pico, art did homage to him in Fra Bartolommeo, and the Church in its Head strangled him. The next man who knocked at the gates of Rome was followed by the hosts of that new world, in which the genius of the Italian Reformer had divined an eternal an nism to the Church. The middle ages end with Savonarola, as Luther is the founder of modern society.
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