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 voice 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 smolder 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 Gascon 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. Fra Bartolommeo, one of his followers, painted a profile of him in the character of St. 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 Uffizi 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 fully 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 jaw-bone is hard and heavy, the cheek-bone emergent; between the two the flesh is hollowed, not so much with the emaciation of monastic vigils as with the athletic exercise of wrestling 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 improvisation. 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 of severest accuracy, at one time melting his audience to 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, met and attained, as it were, to single consciousness in him. He then no longer restrained the impulse of his oratory, but became the mouth-piece 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.”
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 betrayed 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. You may read pages of his sermons which seem like vivid narratives of what afterward 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 down 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.
“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 St. 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, Caraffe 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.
CÆSAR BORGIA.
By CHARLES YRIARTE.
[Son of Pope Alexander VI, at first prelate, then soldier and statesman, born about 1457, died 1507. All the contemporary annals concur in giving Cæsar Borgia nearly every private vice, and stamp him as murderer, sensualist, and a man of ruthless ambition. Successively made bishop and cardinal in his earlier years, he was finally secularized and became Duke of Romagna and Valentinois. After having dispossessed the rulers of many small principalities and united them into a duchy, he is believed to have nourished the scheme of founding a united Italy. After some years of vicissitudes Cæsar lost his political ascendency by the election of a pope inimical to his interests, and his military power by the jealousy of the Kings of France and Spain. A consummate soldier and politician, he showed during the short period during which he exercised the functions of a ruler all the traits of a wise, upright, and public-spirited sovereign, in shining contrast with the hideous crimes which had blackened his career as a man. Cæsar Borgia was the model on which Machiavelli drew his “Prince,” in the celebrated politico-historical treatise of that title.]