Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnificent (vol. 2 of 2)

by Alfred von Reumont

CHAPTER VI.

OPPOSITION TENDENCIES. FRA GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA.

The Medici had always counted on the clergy for support. It would be unjust to attribute this entirely to selfish motives; they had other and nobler aims than merely that of more easily ruling the multitude in union with its spiritual directors. Other motives besides scruples of conscience actuated them in the building of churches and convents. The clergy, especially the regular clergy, were, with a portion of the nobility, still the chief representatives of the higher scientific and literary culture. Cosimo’s grandson as well as himself found instruction, entertainment, and intellectual animation in the society of Camaldulensians, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Servites. But as Lorenzo endeavoured to keep under his own control the bishoprics of the district, he made use of the monastic orders in the same way. He employed them privately to discover and direct the stream of popular opinion and popular inclination. Owing to their constitution, their varied composition, their connection with all classes, and their comparative independence, they were at once more trustworthy and abler instruments than the lay communities of various kinds which he ruled by means of his confidants, high and low. These latter societies might prove dangerous to him through party-spirit and secret machinations; a danger which indeed afterwards became apparent, and was vigorously opposed by the rulers of Tuscany. The religious orders, when they devoted themselves to furthering the aims of the Medici, had another advantage over the companies. The many little jealousies and enmities which divided them from each other gave better security for secresy; and the fact that very much depended upon this may afford an explanation of the great liberality of the Medici towards the convents. In the annals of the Monastery of the Angeli, where Cosimo was wont to visit Ambrogio Traversari, and where Lorenzo’s sons went to hear philosophical lectures and to be present at sacred representations, it is recorded that besides the usual yearly gifts of money, Lorenzo used on certain festivals to send to the monks, who were by no means rich, fish, cheese, and fruit; and also that he procured for them the bounty of the Signoria. ‘We owe everything to God, through Lorenzo His instrument.’ Don Guido, formerly a Cistercian monk, who became prior of the Angeli in 1484, was Lorenzo’s confessor.[540]

But it would be a mistake to suppose that even when his relations with the Papacy were most intimate, Lorenzo could reckon unconditionally upon the clergy. Those same disputes between the religious orders came in the way, as well as the democratic spirit prevalent among the monks, which saw through the tendencies of the existing government even when it seemed to be favouring popular objects. This internal opposition naturally developed more strongly as a more serious way of thinking gained ground; such a temper as had been fostered by the pious chief pastors Antonine and Orlando Bonarli, though their successors, under whom the diocese of Florence was chiefly administered by vicars, did nothing to maintain it. About the year 1490 it became apparent that the general life of pleasure and worldliness was about to take a turn in an opposite direction. No one could then foresee the ultimate scope and results of this opposition; but it showed itself in a manner which necessarily attracted the attention of him who was accustomed to direct all things, and who had too much tact and too much practice in judging of moral and intellectual tendencies not to recognise the first symptoms of a turn of the tide. Its importance was the more apparent to him because it showed itself in a field, of which, as of those of politics and literature, he thought himself the ruler; but which was withdrawn from his influence as soon as the prevalent materialistic tendencies were combated by inward moral impulses and views. This resistance was in the highest degree dangerous to the Medici, because its chief strength lay in the moral consciousness of the people, hitherto artificially suppressed or put to sleep, but now awakened to new life; and it was this which enabled it to hold out so firmly long after it appeared to be conquered. It was the fate of the Medici that opposition sprang from ground which they had long been accustomed to regard as their own, and to treat in the light of an heirloom.

In 1482, there entered the convent of San Marco a brother of the order, who had been driven from his native city of Ferrara by the storms of war raging around it, in order to seek a more peaceful sphere of activity beyond the Apennines, little suspecting what other storms he would have to encounter there. The Porta Savonarola at Padua recalls to mind the neighbouring residence of that noble family; and in the Prato della Valle stands a statue of Antonio Savonarola, who manfully defended his native city in the middle of the thirteenth century. In 1440 Michele Savonarola was called to Ferrara, where he was presented with the rights of citizenship by the Marquis Lionello d’Este, and acquired a great reputation as physician in ordinary to the Marquis, as professor at the university, and also as an author.[541] His son Niccolò married Elena Bonacossi, and her masculine spirit was inherited by her son Girolamo, who has made the name of his race famous throughout the world. At the age of three-and-twenty this son, without consulting the wishes of his parents, entered the Predicant order at Bologna in the spring of 1475. In a letter to his father he pleaded, in explanation and justification of the step, his soul’s cry of anguish against the worldliness to which he beheld Italy fallen a prey. ‘I could no longer look upon the deep corruption of the blinded people, the oppression of virtue, the exaltation of vice; it was an unspeakable torment to me, and I prayed daily to God that He might take me out of this pit of destruction. Now, in His infinite goodness, He has vouchsafed this grace to me, notwithstanding my unworthiness.’ But it was not the worldliness of the laity alone that shocked him; the corruption in the Church stood before the eyes of his soul in yet more glaring colours. He lamented it in his poems—highly imaginative and lofty outpourings of a soul brightened with the fire of love, penetrated with the consciousness of the need for a higher development, tortured by a foreboding of approaching judgment.[542] His first intention was to devote himself to teaching rather than to preaching; but in the seventh year after his entrance into the order, he was sent to his native city, where he lived as a stranger, rarely saw even his nearest relatives, and was not much appreciated as a speaker. Yet he cannot have been lacking in eloquence; for one day when he was travelling from Ferrara to Mantua his reproofs made such an impression on the soldiers who were in the boat playing and swearing, that they penitently fell upon their knees before him.

Fra Girolamo’s reception in Florence was not encouraging. The man and the city could not be attractive to each other; the one was leaning more and more towards asceticism, and the other towards immoderate pleasure. The one cared for nothing but Holy Scripture, and developed its doctrines in lofty, unvarnished speech, whose rough careless form was not softened by his Lombard accent, his hoarse voice, and vehement delivery; the other, sharing the common plight, knew little of the Bible, and was accustomed to preachers whose artistic phraseology recalled the elegant tone of the literary palæstra. In his own convent the stranger found little sympathy. A philosophising tone prevailed in conversation; and the adoption of classical learning might well raise some scruples in the mind of the Ferrarese, whose early education had also been of a philosophical kind. This double discord left decided marks in its train. At Savonarola’s Lenten sermons in San Lorenzo in 1483, the number of listeners was extremely small. He himself was perfectly aware of the defects of his delivery: ‘Those who knew me in those days,’ he said ten years later, ‘know that I had neither voice nor lungs, nor understood anything about preaching, so that I was a bore to everybody.’ He needed a longer apprenticeship. For two years he preached during Lent at San Gemignano. Then he was summoned to Brescia, where in 1486 he preached the sermons on the Apocalypse which first extended his reputation, the prophecies in which of divine judgment and the exhortations to repentance recurred vividly to the souls of the people six-and-twenty years later, when the French army was committing that plunder whose horrors have rarely been equalled in Christian times. A chapter of the order held at Reggio brought Savonarola in contact with Giovanni Pico, who took such an interest in the bold and enthusiastic preacher that he got him sent back to Florence, through the intervention of Lorenzo de’ Medici. In 1490 Savonarola returned to San Marco, there to begin the work which left deep and broad traces on the ecclesiastical and political history of Italy; which led to hard fighting, not without fault on his side, but which at last led him to martyrdom, and encircled his brow with a glory that no contradiction and no change of times and views have been able to deprive of its radiance.

Savonarola found in Florence a rival who was his exact opposite in delivery and in opinions. Fra Mariano of Genazzano came from a place situated on the slope of the Aequian and Hernican mountains, and made important by the great palace of the Colonna. He belonged to the order of the Augustinian Hermits, and dwelt in the convent of Sto. Spirito, until Lorenzo, with whom he had managed to get into favour, built a grand convent at the gate of San Gallo, where there was an old church with a decayed hospital and a foundling establishment. This building was razed to the ground in 1524, when the Emperor and a Medicean Pope were sending their troops against Florence; not a trace of it is left, and its place is occupied by the rows of trees and groves of the walk called the Parterre, and the little church of the Madonna della Tosse, which looks like a shrine left standing amid the general destruction.[543] The convent must have been finished about 1488. Lorenzo provided it with a choice library, visited it frequently with intimate friends, and was fond of discussing philosophical and theological questions with Fra Mariano. Naturally, the Augustinian was wont to say that among men of such high position he had never known one so God-fearing as Lorenzo. As a preacher Fra Mariano was just the man for the people, as well as for scholars. He was little of stature, but his voice was full and melodious, and his utterance agreeable; he terrified and comforted, and made his hearers weep and laugh. Poliziano describes the impression made on him by Mariano’s bearing, manner, gestures, and whole appearance, his sonorous voice, his well-chosen expressions, his majestic sentences, the artistic construction of his phrases, the harmoniousness of his cadences, the richness of his imagery, the clearness and force of his contrasts, the grace of his narrations, and his easy changes of subject, preventing all monotony. The picture Poliziano gives of the mode of life and conversation of this spiritual orator, in whom he celebrates only the qualities desirable in a temporal one, shows that Mariano was just the man to sail round the rocks which threatened to wreck Girolamo. ‘I have met him repeatedly at the villa and entered into confidential talk with him. I never knew a man at once more attractive and more cautious. He neither repels by immoderate severity nor deceives and leads astray by exaggerated indulgence. Many preachers think themselves masters of men’s life and death. While they abuse their power, they always look gloomy, and weary men by constantly setting up for judges of morals. But here is a man of moderation. In the pulpit he is a severe censor; but when he descends, he indulges in winning, friendly discourse. Therefore, I and my excellent friend Pico have much intercourse with him, and nothing refreshes us after our literary labours so much as his conversation. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who understands men so well, shows how highly he esteems him, not only in that he has built him a splendid convent, but also in that he often visits him, preferring a conversation with him while walking to any other recreation.’[544]

Savonarola’s biographer Fra Pacifico Burlamacchi is no doubt quite right in praising Fra Mariano’s eloquence rather than his doctrine, in his account of the orator’s little artifice to impress the people. But this man’s mastery of his art must have been considerable, to make Girolamo Benivieni once say to the Ferrarese preacher, ‘Father, no one can deny the truth, the usefulness, and needfulness of your teaching. But your delivery lacks attraction, especially when one is daily led to make a comparison with Fra Mariano.’ To which the other answered that elegance of expression must give way to the simple preaching of sound doctrine.[545] But it was long before Savonarola made his way. His reputation, indeed, increased rapidly, but admirers still flocked round Fra Mariano; princes and commonwealth applied to Lorenzo, begging him to give the Augustinian, who seemed to be regarded as belonging to his household, leave to come and preach to them. Lodovico il Moro begged for this not merely as a personal favour, but because the city and all the people longed for the fulfilment of Lorenzo’s promise; and the consuls of the Sabine town of Norcia—the home of S. Benedict—called Fra Mariano in their letter ‘God’s angel upon earth.’

It seems that Fra Girolamo was discouraged by his former failures in this field, and the growing success of the Augustinian, and thought at first of limiting his efforts to the philosophical and theological instruction of the novices. His short philosophic compendia are only valuable in the present day for their display of a spirit of justice and sense of the need of investigation in human knowledge, and of analytical progress from the known to the unknown, instead of belief by authority; these, as well as his smaller ascetic and moral treatises, mostly date from the first years after his return to Florence. In them may be seen the mystic enthusiasm which soon became more and more prominent in his sermons, expositions of the Bible, his poems, and other important works. Combined with this mysticism was a striving to clothe his views and prophecies of the future with the authority of Holy Scripture, with which he was perhaps better acquainted than anyone else at the time; but he interpreted it with a freedom, perfectly honest on his part, which necessarily aroused scruples, for it opened out a boundless field, where an excited fancy or secondary objects might easily lead him astray; and this danger was the greater when he turned his attention especially to the Apocalypse. In the summer of 1490 divers citizens sought admission to the lectures for the novices. The convent-rooms being too small, Savonarola continued his lectures at first in the court; then, as the number of hearers rapidly increased, he transferred them on August 1 to the church. A rosebush still marks the spot where Fra Girolamo taught in the courtyard of the convent; and in these latter days it has been resolved to raise a statue to him there, and a bust has been placed in what was once his cell. He needs no such monuments where all around recalls his memory; but they are tokens of the veneration paid to him by posterity in spite of all his weaknesses and mistakes.