On the morrow, Palm Sunday, a mob of Arrabiati and others marched to attack the monastery of San Marco. On the way they killed some Piagnoni, including Francesco Valori; his wife, drawn to a window by his cries, was shot through with an arrow; his house was pillaged and burned; one of his grandchildren was smothered to death. The bell of San Marco tolled to call the Piagnoni to the rescue, but they did not come. The friars prepared to defend themselves with swords and clubs; Savonarola in vain bade them lay down their arms, and himself stood unarmed at the altar, awaiting death. The friars fought valiantly; Fra Enrico wielded his sword with secular delight, accompanying each blow with a lusty cry, Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine—“Save thy people, Lord!” But the hostile crowd was too numerous for the friars; Savonarola finally prevailed upon them to lay down their arms; and when an order came from the Signory for his arrest and that of Domenico, the two surrendered, and were led through a mob that jeered, struck, kicked, and spat upon them, to cells in the Palazzo Vecchio. On the following day Fra Silvestro was added to the prisoners.
The Signory sent to Pope Alexander an account of the ordeal and arrest, begged his absolution for the violence committed on an ecclesiastic, and asked his authorization to subject the prisoners to trial, and, if necessary, to torture. The Pope urged that the three friars should be sent to Rome to be tried before an ecclesiastical court; the Signory refused, and the Pope had to be content with having two papal delegates share in examining the accused.34 The Signory was resolved that Savonarola should die. As long as he lived his party would live; only his death, they thought, could heal the strife of factions that had so divided the city and its government that alliance with Florence had become worthless to any foreign power, and Florence lay open to internal conspiracy or external attack.
Following the custom established by the Inquisition, the examiners put the three friars to torture on various occasions between April 9 and May 22. Silvestro succumbed at once, and answered so readily as the examiners wished that his confession was too facile to be useful. Domenico resisted to the last; tortured to the verge of death, he continued to avow that Savonarola was a saint without guile or sin. Savonarola, high-strung and exhausted, soon collapsed under torture, and gave whatever replies were suggested to him. Recovering, he retracted the confession; tortured again, he yielded again. After three ordeals his spirit broke, and he signed a confused confession that he had no divine inspiration, that he had been guilty of pride and ambition, that he had urged foreign and secular powers to call a general council of the Church, and that he had plotted for the deposition of the Pope. On charges of schism and heresy, of revealing confessional secrets as pretended visions and prophecies, of causing faction and disorder in the state, the three friars were condemned to death by the united sentence of state and Church. Alexander graciously sent them absolution.
On May 23, 1498, the parricide Republic executed its founder and his comrades. Unfrocked and barefoot, they were led to the same Piazza della Signoria where twice they had burned the “vanities.” As then, and as for the trial by ordeal, a great crowd gathered for the sight; but now the government supplied it with food and drink. A priest asked Savonarola, “In what spirit do you bear this martyrdom?” He answered, “The Lord has suffered much for me.” He kissed the crucifix that he carried, and did not speak again. The friars walked bravely to their doom, Domenico almost joyfully, singing a Te Deum in gratitude for a martyr’s death. The three men were hanged from a gibbet, and boys were allowed to stone them as they choked. A great fire was lighted under them, and burned them to ashes. The ashes were thrown into the Arno, lest they be worshiped as the relics of saints. Some Piagnoni, braving incrimination, knelt in the square and wept and prayed. Every year until 1703, on the morning after the 23rd of May, flowers were strewn on the spot where the hot blood of the friars fell. Today a plaque in the pavement marks the site of the most famous crime in Florentine history.
Savonarola was the Middle Ages surviving into the Renaissance, and the Renaissance destroyed him. He saw the moral decay of Italy under the influence of wealth and a declining religious belief, and he stood bravely, fanatically, vainly against the sensual and skeptical spirit of the times. He inherited the moral fervor and mental simplicity of medieval saints, and seemed out of place and key in a world that was singing the praises of rediscovered pagan Greece. He failed through his intellectual limitations and a forgivable but irritating egotism; he exaggerated his illumination and his capacity, and naively underestimated the task of opposing at once the power of the papacy and the instincts of men. He was understandably shocked by Alexander’s morals, but intemperate in his denunciations and intransigeant in his policy. He was a Protestant before Luther only in the sense of calling for a reform of the Church; he shared none of Luther’s theological dissents. But his memory became a force in the Protestant mind; Luther called him a saint. His influence on literature was slight, for literature was in the hands of skeptics and realists like Machiavelli and Guicciardini; but his influence on art was immense. Fra Bartolommeo signed his portrait of the friar, “Portrait of Girolamo of Ferrara, prophet sent by God.” Botticelli turned from paganism to piety under Savonarola’s preaching. Michelangelo heard the friar frequently, and read his sermons devotedly; it was the spirit of Savonarola that moved the brush over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and traced behind the altar the terrible Last Judgment.
The grandeur of Savonarola lay in his effort to achieve a moral revolution, to make men honest, good, and just. We know that this is the most difficult of all revolutions, and we cannot wonder that Savonarola failed where Christ succeeded with so pitiful a minority of men. But we know, too, that such a revolution is the only one that would mark a real advance in human affairs; and that beside it the bloody overturns of history are transient and ineffectual spectacles, changing anything but man.
IV. THE REPUBLIC AND THE MEDICI: 1498–1534
The chaos that had almost nullified government in the later years of Savonarola’s ascendancy was not mitigated by his death. The brief term of two months allowed to each Signory and gonfalonier made for a hectic discontinuity in the executive branch, and inclined the priors to irresponsibility and corruption. In 1502 the Council, dominated by a triumphant oligarchy of rich men, sought to overcome part of this difficulty by electing the gonfalonier for life, so that while still subject to Signory and Council, he might face the popes and the secular rulers of Italy on terms of equal tenure. The first man to receive this honor was Pietro Soderini, a millionaire friendly to the people, an honest patriot whose powers of mind and will were not so eminent as to threaten Florence with dictatorship. He enlisted Machiavelli among his advisers, governed prudently and economically, and used his private fortune to resume that patronage of art which had been interrupted under Savonarola. With his support Machiavelli replaced the mercenary troops of Florence with a citizen militia, which finally (1508) forced Pisa to yield again to a Florentine “protectorate.”
But in 1512 the foreign policy of the Republic brought on the disaster that Alexander VI had foretold. Through all the efforts of the “Holy League” of Venice, Milan, Naples, and Rome to rid Italy of its French invaders Florence had persisted in its alliance with France. When victory crowned the League it turned in revenge upon Florence, and sent its troops to replace the republican oligarchy with a Medicean dictatorship. Florence resisted, and Machiavelli labored strenuously to organize its defense. Its outpost, Prato, was taken and sacked, and Machiavelli’s militia turned and fled from the trained mercenaries of the League. Soderini resigned to avoid further bloodshed. Giuliano de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo, having contributed 10,000 ducats ($250,000) to the League treasury, entered Florence under the protection of Spanish, German, and Italian arms; his brother, Cardinal Giovanni, soon joined him; the Savonarolan constitution was abolished, and the Medicean ascendancy was restored (1512).
Giuliano and Giovanni behaved with moderation, and the public, surfeited with excitement, readily accepted the change.
When Giovanni became Leo X (1513), Giuliano, having proved too gentle to be a successful ruler, yielded the government of Florence to his nephew Lorenzo. This ambitious youth died after six years of reckless rule. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, son of the Giuliano who had been slain in the Pazzi conspiracy, now gave Florence an excellent administration; and after he became Clement VII (1521) he ruled the city from the papal chair. Florence took advantage of his misfortunes to expel his representatives (1527), and for four years it again enjoyed the trials of liberty. But Clement tempered defeat with diplomacy, and used the troops of Charles V to avenge his ousted relatives; an army of Spanish and German troops marched upon Florence (1529), and repeated the story of 1512; resistance was heroic but vain; and Alessandro de’ Medici began (1531) a regime of oppression, brutality, and lechery unprecedented in the annals of the family. Three centuries would pass before Florence would know freedom again.
V. ART UNDER THE REVOLUTION
An age of political excitement is usually a stimulant to literature; and we shall study later two writers of the first rank—Machiavelli and Guicciardini—who belonged to this period. But a state always verging on bankruptcy, and engaged in almost permanent revolution, does not favor art—and least of all architecture. Some rich men, skilled in floating on a flood, still gave hostages to fortune by building palaces; so Giovanni Francesco and Aristotele da Sangallo, working on plans by Raphael, raised a palatial mansion for the Pandolfini family. In 1520–4 Michelangelo designed for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici a Nuova Sagrestia, or New Sacristy, for the church of San Lorenzo—a simple quadrangle and modest dome, known to all the world as the home of Michelangelo’s finest sculptures, the tombs of the Medici.
Among the Titan’s rivals was the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who worked with him in Lorenzo’s garden of statuary, and broke his nose to win an argument. Lorenzo was so incensed by this violence that Torrigiano took refuge in Rome. He became a soldier in Caesar Borgia’s service, fought bravely in several battles, found his way to England, and designed there one of the masterpieces of English art, the tomb of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey (1519). Wandering restlessly to Spain, he carved a handsome Madonna and Child for the duke of Arcos. But the duke underpaid him; the sculptor smashed the statue to bits; the vengeful aristocrat denounced him to the Inquisition as a heretic; Torrigiano was sentenced to severe punishment, but cheated his foes by starving himself to death.
Florence had never had so many great artists at one time as in 1492; but many of them fled from her turbulence, and lent their renown to other scenes. Leonardo went to Milan, Michelangelo to Bologna, Andrea Sansovino to Lisbon. Sansovino took his cognomen from Monte San Savino, and made it so famous that the world forgot his real name, Andrea di Domenico Contucci. Born the son of a poor laborer, he developed a passion for drawing and for modeling in clay; a kindly Florentine sent him to the studio of Antonio del Pollaiuolo. Maturing rapidly, he built for the church of Santo Spirito a Chapel of the Sacrament, with statues and reliefs “so vigorous and excellent,” said Vasari, “that they are without a flaw”; and before it he placed a bronze grille that halts the breath with its beauty. King John II of Portugal begged Lorenzo to send the young artist to him; Andrea went, and labored nine years there in sculpture and architecture. Lonesome for Italy, he returned to Florence (1500), but soon passed to Genoa and finally to Rome. In Santa Maria del Popolo he built two marble tombs—for Cardinals Sforza and Basso della Rovere—which won high acclaim in a city then (1505–7) buzzing with geniuses. Leo X sent him to Loreto, and there (1523–8) Andrea adorned the church of Santa Maria with a series of reliefs from the life of the Virgin, so beautiful that the angel in the Annunciation seemed to Vasari “not marble but celestial.” Soon afterward Andrea retired to a farm near his native Monte San Savino, lived energetically as a peasant, and died in 1529, aged sixty-eight.
Meanwhile the della Robbia family had faithfully and skillfully carried on the work of Luca in glazed clay. Andrea della Robbia exceeded in longevity even the eighty-five years of his uncle, and had time to train three sons in the art—Giovanni, Luca, and Girolamo. Andrea’s terra cottas have a brilliance of tone and a tenderness of sentiment that snare the eye and still the feet of the museum traveler. A room in the Bargello is rich with him, and the Hospital of the Innocents is distinguished by his decorative lunette of the Annunciation. Giovanni della Robbia rivaled his father Andrea’s excellence, as one may see in the Bargello and the Louvre. The della Robbias almost confined themselves to religious subjects through three generations; they were among the most fervent supporters of Savonarola; and two of Andrea’s sons joined the Brethren of San Marco to seek salvation with the friar.
The painters felt Savonarola’s influence most deeply. Lorenzo di Credi learned his art from Verrocchio, imitated the style of his fellow student Leonardo, and took the tenderness of his religious pictures from the piety nurtured in him by Savonarola’s eloquence and fate. He spent half his life painting Madonnas; we find them almost everywhere—in Rome, Florence, Turin, Avignon, Cleveland; the faces poor, the robes magnificent; perhaps the best is the Annunciation in the Uffizi. At the age of seventy-two, feeling it time to take on the savor of sanctity, Lorenzo went to live with the monks of Santa Maria Nuova; and there, six years later, he died.
Piero di Cosimo took his cognomen from his teacher Cosimo Rosselli, for “he who instructs ability and promotes well-being is as truly a father as the one who begets.”35 Cosimo came to the conclusion that his pupil surpassed him; summoned by Sixtus IV to decorate the Sistine Chapel, he took Piero with him; and Piero painted there The Destruction of Pharaoh’s Troops in the Red Sea, with a gloomy landscape of water, rocks, and cloudy sky. He has left us two magnificent portraits, both in the Hague: of Giuliano da Sangallo and Francesco da Sangallo. Piero was all artist, caring little for society or friendship, loving nature and solitude, absorbed in the pictures and scenes that he painted. He died unconfessed and alone, having transmitted his art to two pupils who followed his example by surpassing their master: Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto.
Baccio della Porta took his last name from the gate of San Piero where he lived; when he became a friar he received the name Fra Bartolommeo—Brother Bartholomew. Having studied with Cosimo Rosselli and Piero di Cosimo, he opened a studio with Mariotto Albertinelli, painted many pictures in collaboration with him, and remained bound to him in a fine friendship till parted by death. He was a modest youth, eager for instruction and receptive to every influence. For a time he sought to catch the subtle shading of Leonardo; when Raphael came to Florence Baccio studied perspective with him, and better blending of colors; later he visited Raphael in Rome and painted with him a noble Head of St. Peter. Finally he fell in love with the majestic style of Michelangelo; but he lacked the terrible intensity of that angry giant; and when Bartolommeo attempted the monumental he lost in the enlargement of his simple ideas the charm of his qualities—the rich depth and soft shading of his colors, the stately symmetry of his composition, the piety and sentiment of his themes.
He was deeply stirred by the sermons of Savonarola. He brought to the burning of the vanities all his paintings of the nude. When the enemies of the friar attacked the convent of San Marco (1498) he joined in its defense; in the course of the melee he vowed to become a monk if he survived; he kept his pledge, and in 1500 he entered the Dominican monastery at Prato. For five years he refused to paint, giving himself up to religious exercises. Transferred to San Marco, he consented to add his masterpieces in blue, red, and black to the rosy frescoes of Fra Angelico. There, in the refectory, he painted a Madonna and Child and a Last Judgment; in the cloisters a St. Sebastian; and in Savonarola’s cell a powerful portrait of the friar in the guise of St. Peter Martyr. The St. Sebastian was the only nude that he painted after becoming a monk. Originally it was placed in the church of San Marco, but it was so handsome that some women confessed to having been stirred to wicked thoughts by it, and the prior sold it to a Florentine who sent it to the king o
f France. Fra Bartolommeo continued to paint until 1517, when disease so paralyzed his hands that he could no longer hold the brush. He died in that year, at the age of forty-five.
His only rival for supremacy among the Italian painters of this period was another disciple of Piero di Cosimo. Andrea Domenico d’Agnolo di Francesco Vannuci is known to us as Andrea del Sarto because his father was a tailor. Like most Renaissance artists he developed quickly, beginning his apprenticeship at seven. Piero marveled at the lad’s skill in design, and noted with warm approval how Andrea, when a holyday closed the studio, spent his time drawing the figures in the famous cartoons made by Leonardo and Michelangelo for the Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio. When Piero became in old age too eccentric a master, Andrea and his fellow student Franciabigio set up their own bottega, and for some time worked together. Andrea seems to have begun his independent career by painting, in the court of the Annunziata Church (1509), five scenes from the life of San Filippo Benizzi, a Florentine noble who had founded the order of the Servites for the special worship of Mary. These frescoes, though sorely injured by time and exposure, are so remarkable for draughtsmanship, composition, vividness of narrative, and the soft merging of warm and harmonious colors, that this atrium is now one of the goals of art pilgrims in Florence. For one of the female figures Andrea used as model the woman who in the course of these paintings became his wife—Lucrezia del Fede, a sensuously beautiful shrew whose dark face and raven hair haunted the artist to all but his dying days.