The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
protecting them, the wealthy who cornered grain, who scraped away the wages of the poor, who would give their worn-out shoes in lieu of money. But in the financial crisis through which Florence was passing an exhortation to work was not enough; crowds of peasants were driven into the towns by war and famine; wages must be supplemented by public and private charity. Collections were raised in the churches, in the processions, at the street corners, by house to house visitation; the government was urged to buy up grain from abroad, to open a relief office, to write off old arrears of taxes.
The reform of the public holidays was a natural consequence of the political and moral revolution, for the Medici had closely associated themselves with these, and their return was to be marked by a revival of the old magnificence. Savonarola knew, as all earnest reformers know, that such holidays not only contain possibilities of irreparable evil in themselves, but taint the preceding and succeeding months, and permanently lower the standard of national purity and sobriety. He insisted on the suppression by the State of the horse-races, the bonfires and allegorical processions, the gross carnival songs, which would have been tolerated at no other season; in the country-towns the podesta was to forbid the public dances. His enemies accused him of imposing total abstinence on Florence; a Sienese satirist has jeered at Florentine teetotalism. But this was an exaggeration, based apparently on recommendations for a short fast in time of national humiliation. Savonarola was aware that men and children cannot live without amusement, and hence the processions, the religious dances, the burning of the vanities, which have become so celebrated. Bands of urchins had been wont to stretch poles across the streets and levy black-mail upon the passers-by. The proceeds were expended on a supper, while faggots and brooms were piled around the pole, and the stack converted into a bonfire, after which the rival bands would stone each other throughout the night, leaving some dead upon the square. Savonarola stopped this disgraceful custom; the children used their poles with offertory-bags suspended to collect alms; and marched through the streets in thousands bearing crosses or olive-branches. These bands of hope were organised into a moral police. Gamblers fled at their approach; they freely tore veils, which they thought immodest, from girls’ heads; no lady dared flaunt her finery in the street. They visited houses to collect materials for the great public bonfires, known as the Burning of the Vanities. This latter was no new custom; it had been a common practice with mission friars; so lately as 1493 Fra Bernardino of Feltre had made a bonfire of false hair and books against the faith. Savonarola’s bonfires have become more celebrated, because they replaced the great public feasts, and the process of collection was more elaborate and inquisitorial. All the implements of gambling, false hair, indecent books and pictures, masks and amulets, scents and looking-glasses were cast into the flames. It is impossible to decide whether objects of permanent value were destroyed. Savonarola had some love for poetry and much for art; his denunciations against the realism of contemporary art referred usually to the introduction of portraiture or of nudities into sacred subjects, representations of which should be the picture-books by which to teach the young; among his devotees were several of the leading artists. On the other hand, there is a passage which urges the destruction of objects representing the pagan deities. Drawing from the life had lately been the chief novelty in the development of Florentine art; precisians could scarcely as yet accept this as a matter of course; it would not be surprising if amongthe indecencies were included scientific studies from the nude; two of Savonarola’s artistic followers, Bartolommeo della Porta and Lorenzo di Credi, had, as is known, devoted themselves to the new study, and yet the examples that survive are extremely rare. In literature Burlamacchi, the Friar’s biographer, speaks with delight of the destruction of Pulci and Boccaccio; and this sacrifice Savonarola’s own sermons might lead us to think possible. The idea of the dances was perhaps derived from the well-known pictures of the Dominican artist, Fra Angelico. Three rings of dancers, novices with boys, young friars with young laymen, priests with aged citizens, tripped it round the square with garlands on their heads. Folly, Savonarola preached, had its proper seasons; had not David danced before the ark? There was in this some fantastic exaggeration which did the cause of righteousness no good; all Italy laughed, and this was a pity, for the Florentines were of all Italians the most sensitive; they were too clever to bear ridicule.
No one has questioned the moral transformation wrought by Savonarola. For many, no doubt, it was the beginning of a new life; many resisted the disillusion caused by the tragic circumstances of his end. Nevertheless in a city, where individual liberty was highly prized, the methods of transformation were not always welcome. Street urchins are no trained judges as to what luxuries are meet food for flames; it is not surprising that young bloods jostled the boys in their processions, and threw their crosses into the river. The savage penalties proposed for gambling affected a large proportion of the citizens; the very suggestion that slaves, who turned informers, should be liberated by the State, disturbed the peace of many a fairly decent household. All satirists and reformers believe that their own is an age of decadence, that luxury and vice are the mushroom growth of their own short day. Had Savonarola read his Dante, he would have found his own invectives applied to the golden age of Florence. The effective scene-painting of sin had been the task of generations of mission-friars. But in Savonarola’s character there had been from childhood an element that was at once morbid and quixotic. His early isolation from his fellows, his vivid imagination, his premature and phenomenal horror of sin, his knowledge of the world through the confessional, all caused him to exaggerate the wickedness of his time. There was, moreover, in the religious exaltation of Florence an element of hysteria. The oft-repeated statement, that Savonarola broke up families by encouraging married women to enter nunneries, rests upon a single passage in a Mantuan ambassador’s report, which has been strangely misunderstood. But it would seem true that women would rush at night to the Cathedral to struggle with the Friar’s opponents, and that they saw in him the true light that was to come into the world. At the convent of Santa Lucia there was an epidemic of religious mania among nuns of good family; even Savonarola on his trial laughed at the memory of one who snatched away his crucifix and so belaboured him that he could scarce escape her clutches. At San Marco there was a case of hysteric epilepsy, while there can be small question that the fantastic visions of the somnambulist Fr& Silvestro obscured, as time went on, the sounder sense of Savonarola himself.
A not unnatural reaction against the new puritanism showed itself, whenever Savonarola temporarily withdrew or lost his influence. Then the gambling-hells, the taverns, the brothels drove a roaring trade; and Savonarola’s death was followed by scenes of profanity such as Florence had never before witnessed. It was a necessary result of the fusion of ethics and politics that the reformer regarded opposition to his political views as involving sin. Thus the dividing line in politics produced cleavage in morals and religion, and vice versa. Serious political opponents became confused with men of pleasure, and, indeed, scents and silks and sin were too apt to be the outward signs of the party loyalty of the Arrabbiati. Florence on a small scale prefigured our own Commonwealth and its results.
Although Savonarola seemed for a time all-powerful, yet from the first there were elements of opposition. Florence had been saved from bloodshed but not from discord; as the chemist Landucci put it, “some would have it roast and others liked it boiled”; there were those who muttered, “this dirty friar is bringing us to grief.” Parties began to shape themselves. It was scarcely a conflict of class against class, though as yet Savonarola could usually rely upon the middle, and, perhaps, upon the lower classes. Most of the aristocrats who had been instrumental in Piero’s expulsion were opposed to the Friar who had robbed them of their reward. Less moderate than their leader Piero Capponi were the Nerli, the Pazzi, the younger line of Medici, and the clever lawyer Vespucci, the more pronounced of whom were nicknamed Arrabbiati. But Francesco Valori, a leading member of the Twenty, after some hesitation became the recognised head of the Savonarolists, who were christened Piagnoni (snivellers) or Colletorti (wry-necks). They could boast of other members of good family, who before or afterwards played leading parts. Such were Paol’ Antonio Soderini, Giovanni Battista Ridolfi, Luca Albizzi, Alamanno and Jacopo Salviati, and Piero Guicci-ardini, the historian’s father. The remnants of the Medicean party lay low, thankful to have escaped with a sound skin, or attached themselves to the other groups. The Savonarolist party, writes Parenti, included many Mediceans who had owed their lives to him; and it was a common accusation against the Friar that he was a secret adherent of the Medici.
Family solidarity was the most permanent