The young Savonarola was as yet no match for Lorenzo. And whither could he look for help? The reform of morals he so ardently desired was not to be expected from the Church. Florence well knew that Sixtus had plotted to murder the Medici before the altar at the moment of the elevation of the Host. Excommunicated for a deed of justice after the failure of this Popish plot, the city had long been at war with the pontiff. If anywhere it was in the cells of the philosophers, in that retreat where Ficino burned his lamp to Plato, in that hall where the Academy crowned their master's bust with laurels, that the more sober-minded citizens found ghostly comfort and advice. But from this philosophy the fervent soul of Savonarola turned with no less loathing, and with more contempt, than from the Canti Carnascialeschi and Aristophanic pageants of Lorenzo, which made Florence at Carnival time affect the fashions of Athens during the Dionysia. It is true that Italy owed much to the elevated theism developed by Platonic students. While the humanists were exalting pagan license, and while the Church was teaching the worst kinds of immorality, the philosophers kept alive in cultivated minds a sense of God.
But the monk, nourished on the Bible and S. Thomas, valued this confusion of spirits and creeds in a chaos of indiscriminate erudition, at a small price. He had the courage in the fifteenth century at Florence to proclaim that the philosophers were in hell, and that an old woman knew more of saving faith than Plato. Savonarola and Lorenzo were opposed as champions of two hostile principles alike emergent from the very life of the Renaissance: paganism reborn in the one, the spirit of the gospel in the other. Both were essentially modern; for it was the function of the Renaissance to restore to the soul of man its double heritage of the classic past and Christian liberty, freeing it from the fetters which the Middle Ages had forged. Not yet, however, were Lorenzo and Savonarola destined to clash. The obscure friar at this time was preaching to an audience of some thirty persons in San Lorenzo, while Poliziano and all the fashion of the town crowded to the sermons of Fra Mariano da Genezzano in Santo Spirito. This man flattered the taste of the moment by composing orations on the model of Ficino's addresses to the Academy, and by complimenting Christianity upon its similarity to Platonism. Who could then have guessed that beneath the cowl of the harsh-voiced Dominican, his rival, burned thoughts that in a few years would inflame Florence with a conflagration powerful enough to destroy the fabric of the Medicean despotism?
From Florence, where he had met with no success, Savonarola was sent to San Gemignano, a little town on the top of a high hill between Florence and Siena. We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange feudal towers, tall pillars of brown stone, crowded together within the narrow circle of the town walls. Very beautiful is the prospect from these ramparts on a spring morning, when the song of nightingales and the scent of acacia flowers ascend together from the groves upon the slopes beneath. The gray Tuscan landscape for scores and scores of miles all round melts into blueness, like the blueness of the sky, flecked here and there with wandering cloud-shadows. Let those who pace the grass-grown streets of the hushed city remember that here the first flash of authentic genius kindled in Savonarola's soul. Here for the first time he prophesied: 'The church will be scourged, then regenerated, and this quickly.' These are the celebrated three conclusions, the three points to which Savonarola in all his prophetic utterances adhered.
But not yet had he fully entered on his vocation. His voice was weak; his style uncertain; his soul, we may believe, still wavering between strange dread and awful joy, as he beheld, through many a backward rolling mist of doubt, the mantle of the prophets descend upon him. Already he had abandoned the schoolmen for the Bible. Already he had learned by heart each verse of the Old and New Testaments. Pondering on their texts, he had discovered four separate interpretations for every suggestion of Sacred Writ. For some of the pregnant utterances of the prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery. The flame which began to smoulder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze at Brescia, in 1486. Savonarola was now aged thirty-four. 'Midway upon the path of life' he opened the Book of Revelation: he figured to the people of Brescia the four-and-twenty elders rising to denounce the sins of Italy, and to declare the calamities that must ensue. He pictured to them their city flowing with blood. His voice, which now became the interpreter of his soul, in its resonance and earnestness and piercing shrillness, thrilled his hearers with strange terror. Already they believed his prophecy; and twenty-six years later, when the soldiers of Gaston de Foix slaughtered six thousand souls in the streets of Brescia, her citizens recalled the Apocalyptic warnings of the Dominican monk.
As Savonarola is now launched upon his vocation of prophecy, this is the right moment to describe his personal appearance and his style of preaching. We have abundant material for judging what his features were, and how they flashed beneath the storm of inspiration.[1] Fra Bartolommeo, one of his followers, painted a profile of him in the character of S. Peter Martyr. This shows all the benignity and grace of expression which his stern lineaments could assume. It is a picture of the sweet and gentle nature latent within the fiery arraigner of his nation at the bar of God. In contemporary medals the face appears hard, keen, uncompromising, beneath its heavy cowl. But the noblest portrait is an intaglio engraved by Giovanni della Corniole, now to be seen in the Uffizzi at Florence. Of this work Michael Angelo, himself a disciple of Savonarola, said that art could go no further. We are therefore justified in assuming that the engraver has not only represented faithfully the outline of Savonarola's face, but has also indicated his peculiar expression. A thick hood covers the whole head and shoulders. Beneath it can be traced the curve of a long and somewhat flat skull, rounded into extraordinary fullness at the base and side. From a deeply sunken eye-socket emerges, scarcely seen, but powerfully felt, the eye that blazed with lightning. The nose is strong, prominent, and aquiline, with wide nostrils, capable of terrible dilation under the stress of vehement emotion. The mouth has full, compressed, projecting lips. It is large, as if made for a torrent of eloquence: it is supplied with massive muscles, as if to move with energy and calculated force and utterance. The jawbone is hard and heavy; the cheekbone emergent: between the two the flesh is hollowed, not so much with the emaciation of monastic vigils as with the athletic exercise of wrestlings in the throes of prophecy. The face, on the whole, is ugly, but not repellent; and, in spite of its great strength, it shows signs of feminine sensibility. Like the faces of Cicero and Demosthenes, it seems the fit machine for oratory. But the furnaces hidden away behind that skull, beneath that cowl, have made it haggard with a fire not to be found in the serener features of the classic orators. Savonarola was a visionary and a monk. The discipline of the cloister left its trace upon him. The wings of dreams have winnowed and withered that cheek as they passed over it. The spirit of prayer quivers upon those eager lips. The color of Savonarola's flesh was brown: his nerves were exquisitely sensitive yet strong; like a network of wrought steel, elastic, easily overstrained, they recovered their tone and temper less by repose than by the evolution of fresh electricity. With Savonarola fasts were succeeded by trances, and trances by tempests of vehement improvization. From the midst of such profound debility that he could scarcely crawl up the pulpit steps, he would pass suddenly into the plenitude of power, filling the Dome of Florence with denunciations, sustaining his discourse by no mere trick of rhetoric that flows to waste upon the lips of shallow preachers, but marshaling the phalanx of embattled arguments and pointed illustrations, pouring his thought forth in columns of continuous flame, mingling figures of sublimest imagery with reasonings severest accuracy, at one time melting his audience tears, at another freezing them with terror, again quickening their souls with prayers and pleadings and blessings that had in them the sweetness of the very spirit of Christ. His sermons began with scholastic exposition; as they advanced, the ecstasy of inspiration fell upon the preacher, till the sympathies of the whole people of Florence gathered round him,[2] met and attained, as it were, to single consciousness in him. He then no longer restrained the impulse of his oratory, but became the mouthpiece of God, the interpreter to themselves of all that host. In a fiery crescendo, never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of vision, he ascended the altar steps of prophecy, and, standing like Moses on the mount between the thunders of God and the tabernacles of the plain, fulminated period after period of impassioned eloquence. The walls of the church re-echoed with sobs and wailings dominated by one ringing voice. The scribe to whom we owe the fragments of these sermons, at times breaks off with these words: 'Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on.' Pico della Mirandola tells us that the mere sound of Savonarola's voice, startling the stillness of the Duomo, thronged through all its space with people, was like a clap of doom: a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, the hairs of his head stood on end, as he listened. Another witness reports: 'These sermons caused such terror, alarm, sobbing, and tears that every one passed through the streets without speaking, more dead than alive.'
[1] Engravings of the several portraits may be seen in Harford's Life of Michael Angelo Buonarroti (Longmans, 1857 vol. i.), and also in Villari.
[2] Nardi, in his Istorie di Firenze (lib. ii. cap. 16), describes the crowd assembled in the Duomo to hear Savonarola preach: 'Per la moltitudine degli uditori non essendo quasi bastante la chiesa cattedrale di santa Maria del Fiore, ancora che molto grande e capace sia, fu necessario edificar dentro lungo i pareti di quella, dirempetto al pergamo, certi gradi di legname rilevati con ordine di sederi, a guisa di teatro, e così dalla parte di sopra all' entrata del coro e dalla parte di sotto in verso le porte della detta chiesa.'
Such was the preacher: and such was the effect of his oratory. The theme on which he loved to dwell was this. Repent! A judgment of God is at hand. A sword is suspended over you. Italy is doomed for her iniquity—for the sins of the Church, whose adulteries have filled the world—for the sins of the tyrants, who encourage crime and trample upon souls—for the sins of you people, you fathers and mothers, you young men, you maidens, you children that lisp blasphemy! Nor did Savonarola deal in generalities. He described in plain language every vice; he laid bare every abuse; so that a mirror was held up to the souls of his hearers, in which they saw their most secret faults appallingly portrayed and ringed around with fire. He entered with particularity into the details of the coming woes. One by one he enumerated the bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the trampling down of provinces, the passage of armies, the desolating wars that were about to fall on Italy.[1] You may read pages of his sermons which seem like vivid narratives of what afterwards took place in the sack of Prato, in the storming of Brescia, in the battle of the Ronco, in the cavern-massacre of Vicenza. No wonder that he stirred his audience to their center. The hell within them was revealed. The coming doom above them was made manifest. Ezekiel and Jeremiah were not more prophetic. John crying to a generation of vipers, 'Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!' was not more weighty with the mission of authentic inspiration.
[1] Savonarola's whole view of the situation and of the perils of Italy was that of a prophet. He saw more clearly than other people what was inevitable. But his disciples and the vulgar believed implicitly in his prophetic gift in the narrower sense, that is, in his power to predict events, such as the deaths of Lorenzo and the King of Naples, the punishment of Charles VIII, in the loss of the dauphin, etc. Pico says: 'Savonarola could read the future as clearly as one sees the whole is greater than the part.' And there is no doubt that, as time went on, Savonarola came to believe himself that he possessed this faculty. After his trial and execution a very uncomfortable sense of doubt remained upon the minds of those who had been witnesses of his life-drama. Upon this topic Guicciardini, Stor. Fior., Op. Ined. vol. iii. p. 179; Nardi, Stor. Fior. lib. ii. caps. 16 and 36, may be read with advantage.
'I began'—Savonarola writes himself with reference to a course of sermons delivered in 1491—'I began publicly to expound the Revelation in our Church of S. Mark. During the course of the year I continued to develop to the Florentines these three propositions: That the Church would be renewed in our time; that before that renovation God would strike all Italy with a fearful chastisement; that these things would happen shortly.' It is by right of the foresight of a new age contained in these three famous so-called conclusions that Savonarola deserves to be named the Prophet of the Renaissance. He was no apostle of reform: it did not occur to him to reconstruct the creed, to dispute the discipline, or to criticise the authority of the Church. He was no founder of a new order: unlike his predecessors, Dominic and Francis, he never attempted to organize a society of saints or preachers; unlike his successors, Caraffa the Theatine and Loyola the Jesuit, he enrolled no militia for the defense of the faith, constructed no machinery for education. Starting with simple horror at the wickedness of the world, he had recourse to the old prophets. He steeped himself in Bible studies. He caught the language of Malachi and Jeremiah. He became convinced that for the wickedness of Italy a judgment was imminent. From that conclusion he rose upon the wings of faith to the belief that a new age would dawn. The originality of his intuition consisted in this, that while Italy was asleep, and no man trembled for the future, he alone felt that the stillness of the air was fraught with thunder, that its tranquillity was like that which precedes a tempest blown from the very nostrils of the God of Hosts.