A feast of vanities

The name of Savonarola slides off the tongue as if concocted for an orator’s climax. But when it came to names, whether by melody or reputation, the Florence he knew offered aggressive competition. Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ de’ Medici, Botticelli, Michelangelo and Machiavelli all shared his era.

In an unexpected and sympathetic conclusion to the radical friar’s latest biography, Donald Weinstein defends one of George Eliot’s least loved novels, Romola:

Eliot’s success in bridging the 400-year historical and cultural divide between herself and Savonarolan Florence was remarkable, and her judgment of the Frate himself nuanced and independent.

But ‘Savonarolan Florence’, Weinstein contends, has always been a work of fiction, whether woven by the friar, his followers or his detractors. One of Weinstein’s most helpful corrections is banished to a back-note: ‘Savonarola was never master of Florence.’ His biography, then, is more myriad than monolithic. There are intrigues here, character sketches, laws, wars, factions and fashions recorded with particular attention during the four years (1494-8) of Savonarola’s precarious ascendancy in Florence, with that city under the spell of what Weinstein memorably dubs the Frate’s ‘charisma of grace’.

Apparently keeping Eliot’s ‘nuanced and independent’ verdict in mind as a private ideal, Weinstein remains for most of the book discreet to the point of enigma about where he himself stands on his subject. Regarding bias as a mortal sin, Weinstein strives to make every morsel of information about the friar available. The result, rather like the ‘Apuleian feast’ thrown by Lorenzo de’ Medici on St Cosmas’s Day, is various, filling and best digested slowly. But the final course certainly justifies the frustrating profusion of antipasti.

Weinstein’s Savonarola is a consistent, recognisable and tragic character — a talented, if inflexible man, who finds within himself a dangerous power (call it eloquence or ‘prophecy’),which he takes to its extra-logical conclusion; then, after years of Faustian fame, he is forced to renounce it, not merely by the crude expedient of torture on the rope or strappado, but also by a true loss of self-confidence, internal and external.