The Dominican Friar Who Ruled Florence for Four Years, Burned the City's Artwork and Books, and Was Then Burned Himself in the Same Piazza

Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) was a Dominican friar from Ferrara who had been sent to the Convent of San Marco in Florence in 1482 as a junior preacher. His early Florentine preaching had been unsuccessful; he had returned to Ferrara in 1487. In 1490 Lorenzo de’ Medici personally requested his recall to San Marco — not because Lorenzo wanted Savonarola personally but because the convent’s leadership had asked for him.

By 1491 Savonarola had been elected prior of San Marco. From the pulpit of the Florence Cathedral he was, by 1494, the most influential preacher in the city. His preaching had three persistent themes: imminent divine judgement on the moral corruption of Renaissance Italy, the specific moral corruption of the Medici regime, and the inevitability of a foreign invasion that would chastise Italy.

The foreign invasion arrived in September 1494: the French king Charles VIII descended on Italy with approximately 25,000 troops. Lorenzo de’ Medici had died in April 1492; his successor Piero de’ Medici handled the French crisis incompetently. In November 1494 the Florentine civic council expelled Piero and the Medici family from the city. The Florentine Republic, dormant since the 1430s, was reconstituted.

Savonarola moved from preacher to effective political leader. From November 1494 until his death three and a half years later he dominated the Florentine government without holding formal political office. The Republic’s constitutional reform — establishing the Great Council on Venetian models, with approximately 3,000 male citizens eligible to vote — was carried through under his ideological supervision.

The civic programme

The Savonarolan Florentine regime of 1494–1498 was an austere theocratic republic. Sumptuary laws restricted clothing and jewellery. Gambling was prohibited. Sodomy was criminalised with progressively harsher penalties. A youth militia (“the Fanciulli” — the Children) was organised to patrol the city and report moral violations to the civic authorities. Carnival in 1495, 1496, and 1497 was progressively reduced and finally replaced with religious processions.

The economic programme was less successful. Florence’s commercial fortunes depended on luxury textile manufacturing and on banking. Both sectors were materially damaged by the religious-political regime that discouraged conspicuous consumption among the European customers who bought Florentine goods.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

The most famous single event of the Savonarolan regime was the Falò delle Vanità (“Bonfire of the Vanities”) of February 1497. The bonfire was held in the Piazza della Signoria on 7 February 1497 — the seventh and last day of the Carnival, deliberately scheduled by Savonarola to displace the traditional Carnival festivities.

A wooden pyre approximately 18 metres tall was constructed at the centre of the piazza in seven tiers. The objects to be burnt had been collected over the preceding weeks by the Fanciulli, who had gone door-to-door requesting voluntary surrender of items in the named categories. The seven tiers held:

— Books considered immoral (including most of Boccaccio’s Decameron, Petrarch, and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria) — Manuscripts of immoral songs and musical instruments — Mirrors, cosmetics, perfumes, and luxury accessories — Wigs and false hair — Chess sets and playing cards — Paintings and sculptures considered immoral (most catalogued items were anonymous classical-style nudes; the Florentine identifications of specific named paintings burned in 1497 — Botticelli’s lost early work and similar attributions — are partly legendary and partly real) — Carnival masks and costumes

The pile was lit at sunset. It burned for several hours.

Sandro Botticelli — whose late religious paintings, particularly the 1500 Mystic Nativity, show a substantial stylistic break with his earlier Medicean Venuses — is documented by Giorgio Vasari as having voluntarily contributed several of his own early paintings to the 1497 pyre. The contemporary attribution evidence is partial; Botticelli’s documented retrospective devotion to Savonarola is robust.

A second smaller bonfire was held in February 1498. It was less effective; popular enthusiasm for the regime was waning.

The papal pressure

Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) had been increasingly hostile to the Savonarolan regime since 1495. The political reason was geopolitical: Savonarola supported Florence’s alignment with France, while the Borgia papacy was building a counter-French alliance with Spain, Milan, and Venice. The doctrinal reason was that Savonarola’s public preaching had begun by 1495 to identify the Borgia papacy specifically by name as an example of the corruption he was denouncing.

Alexander VI ordered Savonarola to stop preaching in November 1496. Savonarola obeyed for a few months, then resumed. The Pope excommunicated him in May 1497. Savonarola argued from the pulpit that the excommunication was invalid because the Pope was personally morally unfit to issue ecclesiastical sanctions.

The political consequence was a Florentine civic split. The conservative pro-Medici faction (the Palleschi), the moderate civic faction (the Bigi), and the anti-Savonarolan ecclesiastical faction (the Arrabbiati) consolidated against the Savonarolan faction (the Piagnoni, “the Weepers”) through 1497.

A failed trial-by-fire challenge between a Savonarolan friar and a Franciscan opponent in April 1498 — the Franciscans agreed to the ordeal, then withdrew, but the public expectation of the spectacle had been built up — discredited the Piagnoni faction. A mob attacked San Marco on the night of 8 April 1498. The civic government arrested Savonarola the same night.

23 May 1498

The trials of Savonarola and his two Dominican supporters Fra Domenico da Pescia and Fra Silvestro Maruffi ran for six weeks. They were tortured under standard Florentine judicial procedure. Savonarola gave confessions and partially retracted them on multiple occasions. The final confession — which Florentine contemporary observers believed had been written by his interrogators and only signed by him — admitted to false prophecy, political conspiracy, and ecclesiastical insubordination.

The three were taken on the morning of 23 May 1498 to the Piazza della Signoria — the same piazza that had been the site of the 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities. A purpose-built scaffold-and-pyre structure had been erected at the central position the pyre had occupied fifteen months earlier. The three friars were hanged on the scaffold first. Their bodies were then burned. The ashes were collected and thrown into the Arno River downstream, to prevent the Piagnoni faction from collecting them as relics.

Savonarola was 45.

A small bronze plaque set into the paving of the Piazza della Signoria still marks the spot. The plaque was placed by the city of Florence in 1898 — four centuries after the execution — and bears the inscription specifying the date and the names of the three friars. Florentines bring flowers there on 23 May each year.