Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (review)

Forty years after his landmark and now classic Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970), Donald Weinstein returns to the fascinating and tragic figure of Girolamo Savonarola with a moving and magisterial biography. The earlier book established the paradigm for modern Savonarola studies, showing that it was Florence that converted Savonarola to the “myth” of its own prophetic and millenarian destiny, not Savonarola who recalled a secular Florence to religion. In this new book Weinstein vividly re-creates the life of the charismatic preacher who, although not a Florentine, dramatically occupied center stage in Florentine politics and religious life for more than three years—from the expulsion of the Medici and creation of the popular republic and Great Council, whose shape he heavily influenced, until his trial and execution in 1498. Utilizing many new studies of the past four decades and ranging widely in the huge corpus of the Dominican’s sermons, letters, and treatises as well as the writings of supporters and opponents, Weinstein has crafted a powerful narrative of Savonarola’s preaching career, his controversial political role, and dire fate.

This splendid book poignantly explores the terrible irony of Savonarola’s relationship to Florence. Denunciations of Florentine luxury and lax piety, accompanied by prophecies of divine retribution, had characterized his preaching before 1494. In a moment of crisis, revolution, and a vacuum of power, however, many (but certainly not all) Florentines pushed Savonarola into the role of a divinely ordained civic prophet who merged republican renewal and religious purification. Although Savonarola accepted his new role willingly, he was sometimes beset by doubts and misgivings and had to be drawn back into the fray by supporters who looked to him for inspiration and guidance. As Weinstein puts it, Savonarola was “propelled . . . by the needy adulation of his audiences” (p. 285).

Initially his preaching was perfectly orthodox, his moral austerity echoing an accepted tradition of mendicant asceticism. But the addition of the political agenda urged on him by the Florentines made for a volatile mix. When traditional prophecies of punishment for sin metamorphosed, at the end of 1494, into a millenarian vision of Florentine power, liberty, wealth, and leadership in the renewal of Christianity, Savonarola began to attract the Church’s threatening skepticism. When he took Old Testament prophets as his models and insisted that the Almighty had revealed to him that the Church itself required a scourging and renewal, he drew down on himself the pope’s implacable wrath. Savonarola’s open criticism of the corrupt papacy of Alexander VI put Florence in danger, and the austere moral reforms he urged on the Florentines finally exhausted even his followers’ considerable thirst for pure and uncompromised religion. Many who had venerated Savonarola turned against or away from him and let his enemies, in Florence and the Church, use trumped-up charges of heresy to subject him to ghastly torture and public execution. Weinstein’s eloquent account of the friar’s physical and psychological destruction is harrowing.

One small correction: in Machiavelli’s first Decennale, the “capon” whose “voice was heard amongst a hundred roosters” is not Savonarola (p. 311), but Piero Capponi, who famously threatened Florentine resistance to any French attack. This and a few inaccuracies regarding the pre–Savonarolan political context do not diminish this reader’s admiration for Weinstein’s mastery of Savonarola’s writings and sermons and of the religious culture that underlay them, as well as for his nuanced assessment, at once empathetic and discerning, of how Savonarola was drawn by the Florentines into an ultimately untenable role.