Savonarola
Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) was a fanatical Dominican friar who denounced what he perceived as the frivolity and moral corruption of his contemporaries and was responsible for the establishment in the 1490s of a short-lived religious republic in the city of Florence. Girolamo is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, IPA: /dzi 'rɔː la mo/, and Savonarola is pronounced with the stress on the penultimate syllable, [[IPA|sa vo na 'rɔː la}}.
Savonarola was born in Ferrara into a well-to-do family - his father was a doctor at the court of the Duke of Ferrara - and while still a student at the University of Ferrara began to articulate views severely critical of the corruption of the clergy and of the papal authorities in Rome. In 1475 he became a Dominican friar, entering the monastery of San Marco in Bologna, and in the course of the next few years was sent to preach in various cities in northern Italy. In 1481 he was sent to Florence, where he remained until 1487, but his sermons made little impression on the Florentines. In 1490, however, at the suggestion of the philosopher Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Savonarola was invited to return to Florence. This time the mood of the city was more sombre, and his warnings of disaster if the Florentines did not repent of their sinful ways and return to the simplicity of the early Christian church met with a more sympathetic reception and persuaded many to adopt his austerely puritanical ideals.
After the death in 1492 of Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of the city, Savonarola's apocalyptic prophesies became more insistent and in 1494 appeared to be vindicated when Florentine territory was invaded by the army of the French king Charles VIII. The Medici family went into exile, and Savonarola secured a number of changes to the Florentine constitution and established a religious republic in the city. Harsh laws were enacted against various forms of what was considered to be immoral behaviour - homosexual acts, for example, attracted the death penalty. Citizens were expected to rid their homes of anything suggestive of a frivolous, worldly, or immoral way of life, and to inform on neighbours who failed to do this. Large numbers of paintings, sculptures, fine clothes, musical instruments, books, and other objects which could have no place in the austere way of life Savonarola sought to impose on the city were brought to the central square, the Piazza della Signoria, and destroyed in the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities (Falò delle vanità).
The religious republic did not last long. Savonarola had made an enemy of Pope Alexander VI, who was affronted by his claims to moral authority and his refusal to cooperate with the Vatican's foreign policy. In 1495 Alexander ordered him to stop preaching and when in the following year he disobeyed by giving a series of sermons in the Cathedral, excommunicated him. By this time Savonarola was beginning to lose influence in the city, where poor harvests and an outbreak of the plague had led to disillusionment with his authority, and when in 1498 Alexander demanded his arrest and execution, the Florentine government did not resist. In April 1498 Savonarola was arrested along with two of his most devoted disciples, Fra Domenico da Pescia and Fra Silvestro. All three were tortured, forced to sign confessions, and burnt to death in the Piazza della Signoria on 23rd May 1498.
Savonarola's views seem to have been shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by a number of his eminent contemporaries. Among his admirers in Florence were the philosophers Pico della Mirandola {1463-1494) and Angelo Poliziano (1464-1494); Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) was one of several Florentine painters who under Savonarola's influence consigned some of their works to be burnt in the Bonfire of the Vanities; and outside Italy the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) and the German Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) were both influenced by Savonarola's resistance to the authority of the Pope. Even Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), who refers to Savonarola rather disparagingly in The Prince, appears in The Discourses to speak of him with greater respect.
Today the Monastery of San Marco, of which Savonarola became prior in 1492 is a museum, but Savonarola's cell there has been preserved and may be seen by visitors to the museum. In the Piazza della Signoria a round plaque set in the ground marks the place where Savonarola, Fra Domenico, and Fra Silvestro were burnt to death.
George Eliot's historical novel Romola (1862-1863) is set in Florence in the 1490s and has Savonarola as one of its principal characters.
