DOCUMENTS: THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

preach chastity and maintain concubines. They enjoin fasting and partake of splendid feasts . . .
Only look today at the prelates. They are tied to earthly vanities. They love them. The cure of
souls is no longer their concern . . . In the Primitive Church the chalices were made of wood and
the prelates of gold - today - chalices of gold, prelates of wood!
P. Miscatelli, Savonarola (1930)
9. The story of Savonarola is a mixture of tragedy and hysteria, in which a genuine pity for
man’s condition became enraveled in hate and muddled by political intrigue. His denunciation of
worldliness, his childish burning of vanities, his fiery condemnation of a lazy and corrupt clergy,
were part of a threnody of the life of Europe, frequently heard, frequently forgotten; but
Savonarola spoke at a time when the young Piero de Medici was displaying a singular lack of his
family’s genius. Behind Savonarola loomed the discontented poor, who were eager for a change,
eager for secular as well as religious hope. Those families whom the Medici had excluded and
despised knew how to manipulate this superlative demagogue, this being whose wild sermons
could inflame a multitude. So what started in evangelism finished in political revolution.
The little people, the piagnoni (snivelers) as the old oligarchs called them, became a power in
the land. Popolo e Libertà frequently echoed in the Piazza
. . . in Florence . . . the oligarchs disliked both the rantings of Savonarola and the government of
the people; in the wings lurked the exiled Medici - they were powerful in Rome. The inevitable
end came: the rack and the fagot for Savonarola, the defeat of his piagnoni; and in the fullness of
time, the return of the Medici.
The whole Savonarola episode is a curious mixture of idealism, ineptitude, and iniquity.
Certainly Savonarola wanted a Florentine government that represented more fully the whole
citizenship - the poor and the dispossessed as well as the rich and the powerful. He also hated
life, grew drunk on his own megalomaniac visions, preferred prophecy to policy, and welcomed
the disasters he had done so much to promote. Ignorance married to prejudice, blind hatred
linked with a disgust for life, proved an unsatisfactory basis for statesmanship, even when
practiced by a saint.
J.H. Plumb, The Italian Renaissance (1961)
10. I judge the principal and true profession of a Courtier ought to be in feats of arms, the which
above all I will have him to practice lively . . .
(The Courtier should excel) . . . in those studies which they call Humanity,
and . . . have not only the understanding of the Latin tongue, but also of the Greek, because of
the many and sundry things that with great excellency are written in it. Let him much exercise
himself in poets, and no less in orators and historiographers, and also in writing both rhyme and
prose, and especially in our vulgar tongue . . .
Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier (1523)