Zero tolerance in Florence

It is easy to get misty-eyed about Renaissance Florence. How gorgeous it was, we tell ourselves, this City of the Lily, with its lissom youths and comely maidens, each one a Gozzoli ephebe or a Botticelli Venus, its humanist scholars poring over the latest haul of Greek manuscripts, Donatello and Cellini fashioning flawless marble and bronze, Brunelleschi winching the last blocks of his miraculous cupola into place, Masaccio slapping down the sublime ‘Tribute Money’ on the wet plaster of the Brancacci Chapel, and those dear, wise Medici guiding it all towards a purple-prose apotheosis in the pages of Burckhardt and Berenson. Oh to be in Fiesole now that April’s there!

Fra Girolamo Savonarola has traditionally been seen as the party-pooper at this cultural banquet. Into a world of carnival sex, street-corner gambling, priests who lit votive candles to Plato, and cross-dressing whores catering for the city’s burgeoning population of sodomites strode the hook-nosed Dominican from Ferrara, as chief instructor in theology at the convent of San Marco. Appointed prior in 1491, he forced greater austerity upon the brethren and, after a few false starts, gained a reputation throughout Tuscany as ‘the preacher of the desperate and malcontent’, fearlessly hammering corruption among Italy’s princes and prelates. When in 1494 the Florentines chased out their overlord Piero de’ Medici, whose one claim to distinction lay in being the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Savonarola’s moment would seem to have arrived. Florence, he resolved, must become a holy city, its people God’s elect, with San Marco’s Dominicans acting as honest brokers between the grandees of the restored republic and the commonalty, and Fra Girolamo himself, hailed as a second Moses, acting as ultimate arbiter of liberty.

For a season this singular theocratic experiment worked satisfactorily, at least as far as the friar and his followers were concerned.