APPENDIX III.
LORENZO’S LAST HOURS.
Book VI. Chapter VIII.
The interview of Savonarola and Lorenzo de’ Medici has given rise to a controversy which has never been definitively settled. The account of the monk’s biographers, Giovan Francesco Pico and Pacifico Burlamachi, cannot be reconciled with that given in Politian’s letter above referred to. This last has the air of containing a mitigated version of the facts, intended to efface the bad impression made by current reports of the matter; and the third exhortation put into the monk’s mouth by Politian—‘that he should endure death with patience’—sounds almost like a commonplace, considering the gravity of the moment and the characters of the interlocutors. C. F. Meier, in his History of Savonarola (p. 52, &c.), and Villari, in ‘La Storia di Girolamo Savonarola’ (i. 136), accept the version given by the Ferrarese monk’s earliest biographers, and Villari tries to establish it by a long note (p. 155-158). But this version contains great improbabilities. How should the dying man, who had just received the viaticum, make another confession? And what could Savonarola have meant by his famous third demand—what practical use or effect could he expect from it, or from the possible assent of the dying man? The story looks like an invention of the after-days of excitement. The doubts as to the authenticity of the books of Burlamachi and Pico, which, it is suspected, were fabricated in the convent of San Marco and adorned with these authors’ names, are of little consequence in this connection, as in any case the tradition was doubtless current among Savonarola’s contemporaries.
Bartolommeo Cerretani gives, in the third book of his MS. chronicle, the following account of Lorenzo’s last hours:—‘April 7, about the fifth hour, Lorenzo received the Lord’s Supper. As his illness was making such rapid progress, Messer Pier Leoni, otherwise an excellent physician, lost heart; other doctors were at once sent for, but it was too late. Feeling his end approaching, the sick man sent for his eldest son Piero, gave him divers exhortations, and then sent him away. About the twentieth hour he began to cry out: “I am dying and there is none to help me!” All hastened to him. He said he wanted to get up a little, and had himself lifted out of bed, but only to be laid down immediately. The pains were so violent that he lost consciousness. Those standing round him began to weep, for they thought he was dead. A Camaldulensian who was present took off his spectacles, and holding them to his mouth perceived that he still breathed. A restorative was given him and he came to himself. Then he called for his son again and spoke to him softly, so that none of the others heard. After that his condition rapidly grew worse, so that he gave up the ghost on the 8th, about the fourth hour of the evening, in the arms of a valet.’