1492: The Year Our World Began (15 page)

Still, whatever the deficiencies of his taste or the selectivity of his spending, he was the greatest Maecenas of his day. His death not only brought down his political system; it also threatened with extinction the great artistic and cultural movement we call the Renaissance.

The Renaissance no longer looks unique. Historians detect revivals of antique values, tastes, ideas, and styles in almost every century from the fifth to the fifteenth. The West never lost touch with the heritage of Greece and Rome. Nor did Islam. The culture of classical antiquity and all its later revivals were in any case products of large-scale cultural interaction, spanning Eurasia, reflecting and mingling influences from eastern, southern, southwestern, and western Asia. Nor does the reality of the Renaissance match its reputation. Scanning the past for signs of Europe’s awakening to progress, prosperity, and values that we can recognize as our own, we respond to the excitement with which Western writers around the end of the fifteenth century anticipated the dawn of a new “golden age.” As a result, if you are a product of mainstream Western education, almost everything you ever thought about the Renaissance is likely to be false.

“It was revolutionary.”
No:
scholarship has detected half a dozen prior renaissances. “It was secular” or “It was pagan.”
Not entirely:
the church remained the patron of most art and scholarship. “It was art for art’s sake.”
No:
it was manipulated by plutocrats and politicians. “Its art was unprecedentedly realistic.”
Not altogether:
perspective was a new technique, but you can find emotional and anatomical realism in much pre-Renaissance art. “The Renaissance elevated the artist.”
No:
medieval artists might achieve sainthood; wealth and titles were derogatory by comparison. “It dethroned scholasticism and inaugurated humanism.”
No:
it grew out of medieval “scholastic humanism.” “It was Platonist and Hellenophile.”
No:
there were patches of Platonism, as there
had been before, and few scholars did more than dabble in Greek. “It rediscovered lost antiquity.”
Not really:
antiquity was never lost, and classical inspiration never withered (though there was an upsurge of interest in the fifteenth century). “The Renaissance discovered nature.”
Hardly:
there was no pure landscape painting in Europe previously, but nature got cult status in the thirteenth century, as soon as St. Francis found God outdoors. “It was scientific.”
No:
for every scientist there was a sorcerer. “It inaugurated modern times.”
No:
every generation has its own modernity, which grows out of the whole of the past. If modernity, for us, becomes discernible at around the time Lorenzo de’ Medici died, we have to look all around the world to see it stirring.

Even in Florence, the Renaissance was a minority taste. Brunelleschi’s designs for the Baptistery doors—the project widely held to have inaugurated the Renaissance in 1400—were rejected as too advanced. Masaccio, the revolutionary painter who introduced perspective and sculptural realism into his work for a chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in the 1430s, was only the assistant on the project, supervised by a reactionary master. In Italy generally, the most popular painters of the age were the most conservative: Punturicchio, Baldovinetti, and Gozzoli, whose work resembles the glories of medieval miniaturists—brilliant with gold leaf and bright, costly pigments. Michelangelo’s design for the main square of the city—which would have encased the space in a classical colonnade—was never implemented. Much of the supposedly classical art that inspired fifteenth-century Florentines was bogus: the Baptistery was really a sixth- or seventh-century building. The church of San Miniato, which the cognoscenti mistook for a Roman temple, was actually no earlier than the eleventh century.

So Florence was not really classical. Some readers may think that that is too easy to say. By similar logic, after all, one could claim that classical Athens was not classical, for most people there had other values: they worshipped Orphic mysteries, clung to irrational myths, ostracized or condemned some of their most progressive thinkers and
writers, and favored social institutions and political strategies similar to those of today’s “silent majority”: straitlaced, straight-backed “family values.” The plays of Aristophanes—with their lampoons of louche aristocratic habits—are a better guide to Greek morality than the
Ethics
of Aristotle. Florence, too, had its silent majority, whose voice resounded in the 1490s in the blood-and-thunder sermons of the reforming friar Girolamo Savonarola and in the bloodcurdling cries of the street revolutionaries his words helped to stir a few years later.

The principal states of Italy in 1492.

Savonarola was born in 1452 to a life of prosperity, even luxury. Why he turned from it is a mystery—inspired, perhaps, by his pious grandfather, or repelled by his worldly father. There was a hint of reproach or defiance in the language he used when he wrote to his father with the news of his religious vocation.

Homosexuality and whoredom were the sins that preoccupied him most. He was relatively inexplicit about most others. By the age of twenty, he was convinced that he would be “the enemy of the world.” He joined the Dominicans—an order of friars with a strong vocation for preaching and a mission to the poor. He belonged to the strictest tendency in the order, renouncing even the most trivial of personal possessions.

But he was not yet a Bible-thumping thunderer. On the contrary, he was a scholar among scholars, with a distinguished career as a teacher of logic in the schools of his order. The audiences that attended his early sermons consisted of “simpletons and a few little women.” He discovered his talent as a popular preacher in the late 1480s. Public adulation began to turn his head. He started believing that “Christ speaks
through my mouth.” He often vaunted a claim to madness, calling it the folly of God. His views, which were always trenchant, became increasingly fanatical. Rome was a perversion. The true Church was of the poor and known to God alone. His tirades against the sins of the rich became increasingly politically subversive as he established the role of an apostle to the desperate and discontented. “The Devil,” he declared, “uses the great to oppress the poor.” He denounced the greed and egotism of those who could “buy anything with money.” Engravings show what his performances—to call them “sermons” somehow does not capture their function—were like at the time he returned to Florence in 1490 after three years of study in Bologna: the friar flings dramatic, demonstrative gestures at packed audiences, with one hand stretched in rebuke, the other pointing heavenward.
¹²

By then, according to his later recollections, he was reading the Bible, beginning with Genesis, “but then I did not know the reason why”—which was tantamount to saying that his readings were inspired by God. “When I came to the Flood,” he wrote, “it was impossible to go further.” The sense of impending doom, of a new punishment due to a wicked world, was paralyzingly strong. He turned to prophecy suddenly. On the second Sunday of Lent, 1491, he gave a sermon that, he said, terrified even him. After a sleepless night, he predicted the end of extravagance and its replacement by a new regime of poverty and charity and “Christ in men’s hearts.”
¹³

Recurrent images began to characterize his visions, recycled in his sermons. He kept seeing swords and knives raining down on Rome, a golden cross above Jerusalem. The hand of God poised to strike the wicked, while angels distributed crosses to those willing to undertake a spiritual crusade to save the Church and the city from corruption. The angels returned with brimming chalices and gave sweet wine to those who took the cross, bitter dregs to those who refused. In an engraving his admirers bought in bestselling numbers, the people of Jerusalem appeared, stripping for baptism, while Florentines averted their gaze. A
medal struck to exploit the market for Savonarola memorabilia showed contrasting scenes of divine vengeance and abundance. “I saw,” he wrote, in recollections that capture the flavor of the sermons,

Critics of his fanaticism leveled predictable charges. “I am not mad,” Savonarola retorted. At first, he refused to say where he got his prophecies from, because “in the past I, too, would have laughed at such things…. I am not saying, nor have I ever told you, that God speaks to me. I say neither yes or no. You are so far from the faith that you do not believe. You would rather believe in some devil who spoke with men and foretold future things.” Nor did Savonarola make the mistake of claiming any personal merit or pretending, blasphemously, that God’s favor was evidence of God’s grace. “This light,” he admitted, referring to the
gift of prophecy, “does not justify me.” By January 1492, however, he was getting less cautious. “It is God,” he began to claim, “not I, who says these things.”
¹⁵

In as far as they referred to Florence rather than to the Church, Savonarola’s rages against wealth and corruption and the general moral state of the city seem unmistakably directed against Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo, however, showed no resentment or anxiety. He had expelled Bernardo da Feltre, another tub-thumper whom he suspected of political subversion, but he treated Savonarola with indulgence. Lorenzo cherished much devotion for the Dominicans. He regarded their house in Florence as a special project of his dynasty. He hoped to use reformers’ programs and arguments to augment his own family’s influence over the Church.

Nevertheless, it was becoming obvious that Savonarola was shaping up to defy Lorenzo openly. The ground he chose was not solely or even chiefly that of politics, but rather matters of philosophy and taste, and he bade for the support of intellectuals as well as the mob. He prefaced his own prophecies with an anatomization of the falsehood of astrology—which was one of the esoteric enthusiasms of Lorenzo’s circle. Another ground of conflict concerned the usefulness of reason and science. One of the most powerful books to appear in print in 1492 was Savonarola’s ruthlessly masticated digest of logic (
Compendium Logicae
), in which he denounced reason as diabolical. The idea that pagans like Aristotle and Plato had anything to teach readers of scripture was, to him, revolting. He denounced the specious arguments of classically inspired theologians who had tried to fit the ancient Greeks and Romans into God’s scheme of salvation. He pointed out how dodgy their etymologies were that linked Jove and Jehovah. He deplored the way classical scholars made pagan deities double as personifications of Christian virtues, and he lampooned their solemn invocations of Virgil as a supposed prophet of Christian
ity. He scorned humanists’ cherished notion that ancient Greeks had experienced a partial revelation from God.