The Story of Florence

Huge was the delight of the Compagnacci at the prospect of such sport, and the Signoria seized upon it as a chance of ending the matter once for all. Whether the Franciscans were sincere, or whether it was a mere plot to enable the Arrabbiati and Compagnacci to destroy Savonarola, is still a matter of dispute. The Piagnoni were confident in the coming triumph of their prophet; champions came forward from both sides, professedly eager to enter the flames–although it was muttered that the Compagnacci and their Doffo Spini had promised the Franciscans that no harm should befall them. Savonarola misliked it, but took every precaution that, if the ordeal really came off, there should be no possibility of fraud or evasion. Of the amazing scene in the Piazza on April 7th, I will speak in the following chapter; suffice it to say here that it ended in a complete fiasco, and that Savonarola and his friars would never have reached their convent alive, but for the protection of the armed soldiery of the Signoria. Hounded home under the showers of stones and filth from the infuriated crowd, whose howls of execration echoed through San Marco, Fra Girolamo had the Te Deum sung, but knew in his heart that all was lost. That very same day his Cyrus, the champion of his prophetic dreams, Charles VIII. of France, was struck down by an apoplectic stroke at Amboise; and, as though in judgment for his abandonment of what the prophet had told him was the work of the Lord, breathed his last in the utmost misery and ignominy.

The next morning, Palm Sunday, April 8th, Savonarola preached a very short sermon in the church of San Marco, in which he offered himself in sacrifice to God and was prepared to suffer death for his flock. Tanto fu sempre questo uomo simile a sè stesso, says Jacopo Nardi. Hell had broken loose by the evening, and the Arrabbiati and Compagnacci, stabbing and hewing as they came, surged round the church and convent. In spite of Savonarola and Fra Domenico, the friars had weapons and ammunition in their cells, and there was a small band of devout laymen with them, prepared to hold by the prophet to the end. From vespers till past midnight the attack and defence went on; in the Piazza, in the church, and through the cloisters raged the fight, while riot and murder wantoned through the streets of the city. Francesco Valori, who had escaped from the convent in the hope of bringing reinforcements, was brutally murdered before his own door. The great bell of the convent tolled and tolled, animating both besieged and besiegers to fresh efforts, but bringing no relief from without. Savonarola, who had been prevented from following the impulses of his heart and delivering himself up to the infernal crew that thirsted for his blood in the Piazza, at last gathered his friars round him before the Blessed Sacrament, in the great hall of the Greek library, solemnly confirmed his doctrine, exhorted them to embrace the Cross alone, and then, together with Fra Domenico, gave himself into the hands of the forces of the Signoria. The entire cloisters were already swarming with his exultant foes. "The work of the Lord shall go forward without cease," he said, as the mace-bearers bound him and Domenico, "my death will but hasten it on." Buffeted and insulted by the Compagnacci and the populace, amidst the deafening uproar, the two Dominicans were brought to the Palazzo Vecchio. It seemed to the excited imaginations of the Piagnoni that the scenes of the first Passiontide at Jerusalem were now being repeated in the streets of fifteenth century Florence.

The Signoria had no intention of handing over their captives to Rome, but appointed a commission of seventeen–including Doffo Spini and several of Savonarola's bitterest foes–to conduct the examination of the three friars. The third, Fra Silvestro, a weak and foolish visionary, had hid himself on the fatal night, but had been given up on the following day. Again and again were they most cruelly tortured–but in all essentials, though ever and anon they wrung some sort of agonised denial from his lips, Savonarola's testimony as to his divine mission was unshaken. Fra Domenico, the lion-hearted soul whom the children of Florence had loved, and to whom poets like Poliziano had turned on their death-beds, was as heroic on the rack or under the torment of the boot as he had been throughout his career. Out of Fra Silvestro the examiners could naturally extort almost anything they pleased. And a number of laymen and others, supposed to have been in their counsels, were similarly "examined," and their shrieks rang through the Bargello; but with little profit to the Friar's foes. So they falsified the confessions, and read the falsification aloud in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, to the bewilderment of all Savonarola's quondam disciples who were there. "We had believed him to be a prophet," writes Landucci in his diary, "and he confessed that he was not a prophet, and that he had not received from God the things that he preached; and he confessed that many things in his sermons were the contrary to what he had given us to understand. And I was there when this process was read, whereat I was astounded, stupified, and amazed. Grief pierced my soul, when I saw so great an edifice fall to the ground, through being sadly based upon a single lie. I expected Florence to be a new Jerusalem, whence should proceed the laws and splendour and example of goodly living, and to see the renovation of the Church, the conversion of the infidels and the consolation of the good. And I heard the very contrary, and indeed took the medicine: In voluntate tua, Domine, omnia sunt posita."

A packed election produced a new Signoria, crueller than the last. They still refused to send the friars to Rome, but invited the Pope's commissioners to Florence. These arrived on May 19th–the Dominican General, Torriani, a well-intentioned man, and the future Cardinal Romolino, a typical creature of the Borgias and a most infamous fellow. It was said that they meant to put Savonarola to death, even if he were a second St John the Baptist. The torture was renewed without result; the three friars were sentenced to be hanged and then burnt. Fra Domenico implored that he might be cast alive into the fire, in order that he might suffer more grievous torments for Christ, and desired only that the friars of Fiesole, of which convent he was prior, might bury him in some lowly spot, and be loyal to the teachings of Fra Girolamo. On the morning of May 23rd, Savonarola said his last Mass in the Chapel of the Priors, and communicated his companions. Then they were led out on to the Ringhiera overlooking the Piazza, from which a temporary palchetto ran out towards the centre of the square to serve as scaffold. Here, the evening before, the gallows had been erected, beam across beam; but a cry had arisen among the crowd, They are going to crucify him. So it had been hacked about, in order that it might not seem even remotely to resemble a cross. But in spite of all their efforts, Jacopo Nardi tells us, that gallows still seemed to represent the figure of the Cross.

The guards of the Signoria kept back the crowds that pressed thicker and thicker round the scaffold, most of them bitterly hostile to the Friars and heaping every insult upon them. When Savonarola was stripped of the habit of Saint Dominic, he said, "Holy dress, how much did I long to wear thee; thou wast granted to me by the grace of God, and to this day I have kept thee spotless. I do not now leave thee, thou art taken from me." They were now degraded by the Bishop of Vasona, who had loved Fra Girolamo in better days; then in the same breath sentenced and absolved by Romolino, and finally condemned by the Eight–or the seven of them who were present–as representing the secular arm. The Bishop, in degrading Savonarola, stammered out: Separo te ab Ecclesia militante atque triumphante; to which the Friar calmly answered, in words which have become famous: Militante, non triumphante; hoc enim tuum non est. Silvestro suffered first, then Domenico. There was a pause before Savonarola followed; and in the sudden silence, as he looked his last upon the people, a voice cried: "Now, prophet, is the time for a miracle." And then another voice: "Now can I burn the man who would have burnt me"; and a ruffian, who had been waiting since dawn at the foot of the scaffold, fired the pile before the executioner could descend from his ladder. The bodies were burnt to ashes amidst the ferocious yells of the populace, and thrown into the Arno from the Ponte Vecchio. "Many fell from their faith," writes Landucci. A faithful few, including some noble Florentine ladies, gathered up relics, in spite of the crowd and the Signory, and collected what floated on the water. It was the vigil of Ascension Day.

Savonarola's martyrdom ends the story of mediæval Florence. The last man of the Middle Ages–born out of his due time–had perished. A portion of the prophecy was fulfilled at once. The people of Italy and their rulers alike were trampled into the dust beneath the feet of the foreigners–the Frenchmen, the Switzers, the Spaniards, the Germans. The new King of France, Louis XII., who claimed both the Duchy of Milan and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, entered Milan in 1499; and, after a brief restoration, Ludovico Sforza expiated his treasons by being sold by the Swiss to a lingering life-in-death in a French dungeon. The Spaniards followed; and in 1501 the troops of Ferdinand the Catholic occupied Naples. Like the dragon and the lion in Leonardo's drawing, Spain and France now fell upon each other for the possession of the spoils of conquered Italy; the Emperor Maximilian and Pope Julius II. joined in the fray; fresh hordes of Swiss poured into Lombardy. The battle of Pavia in 1525 gave the final victory to Spain; and, in 1527, the judgment foretold by Savonarola fell upon Rome, when the Eternal City was devastated by the Spaniards and Germans, nominally the armies of the Emperor Charles V. The treaty of Câteau-Cambresis in 1559 finally forged the Austrian and Spanish fetters with which Italy was henceforth bound.

The death of Savonarola did not materially alter the affairs of the Republic. The Greater Council kept its hold upon the people and city, and in 1502 Piero di Tommaso Soderini was elected Gonfaloniere for life. The new head of the State was a sincere Republican and a genuine whole-hearted patriot; a man of blameless life and noble character, but simple-minded almost to a fault, and of abilities hardly more than mediocre. Niccolò Machiavelli, who was born in 1469 and had entered political life in 1498, shortly after Savonarola's death, as Secretary to the Ten (the Dieci di Balìa), was much employed by the Gonfaloniere both in war and peace, especially on foreign legations; and, although he sneered at Soderini after his death for his simplicity, he co-operated faithfully and ably with him during his administration. It was under Soderini that Machiavelli organised the Florentine militia. Pisa was finally reconquered for Florence in 1509; and, although Machiavelli cruelly told the Pisan envoys that the Florentines required only their obedience, and cared nothing for their lives, their property, nor their honour, the conquerors showed unusual magnanimity and generosity in their triumph.

These last years of the Republic are very glorious in the history of Florentine art. In 1498, just before the French entered Milan, Leonardo da Vinci had finished his Last Supper for Ludovico Sforza; in the same year, Michelangelo commenced his Pietà in Rome which is now in St Peter's; in 1499, Baccio della Porta began a fresco of the Last Judgment in Santa Maria Nuova, a fresco which, when he entered the Dominican order at San Marco and became henceforth known as Fra Bartolommeo, was finished by his friend, Mariotto Albertinelli. These three works, though in very different degrees, represent the opening of the Cinquecento in painting and sculpture. While Soderini ruled, both Leonardo and Michelangelo were working in Florence, for the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, and Michelangelo's gigantic David–the Republic preparing to meet its foes–was finished in 1504. This was the epoch in which Leonardo was studying those strange women of the Renaissance, whose mysterious smiles and wonderful hair still live for us in his drawings; and it was now that he painted here in Florence his Monna Lisa, "the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea." At the close of 1504 the young Raphael came to Florence (as Perugino had done before him), and his art henceforth shows how profoundly he felt the Florentine influence. We know how he sketched the newly finished David, studied Masaccio's frescoes, copied bits of Leonardo's cartoon, was impressed by Bartolommeo's Last Judgment. Although it was especially Leonardo that he took for a model, Raphael found his most congenial friend and adviser in the artist friar of San Marco; and there is a pleasant tradition that he was himself influential in persuading Fra Bartolommeo to resume the brush. Leonardo soon went off to serve King Francis I. in France; Pope Julius summoned both Michelangelo and Raphael to Rome. These men were the masters of the world in painting and sculpture, and cannot really be confined to one school. Purely Florentine painting in the Cinquecento now culminated in the work of Fra Bartolommeo (1475-1517) and Andrea del Sarto (1486-1531), who had both been the pupils of Piero di Cosimo, although they felt other and greater influences later. After Angelico, Fra Bartolommeo is the most purely religious of all the Florentine masters; and, with the solitary exception of Andrea del Sarto, he is their only really great colourist. Two pictures of his at Lucca–one in the Cathedral, the other now in the Palazzo Pubblico–are among the greatest works of the Renaissance. In the latter especially, "Our Lady of Mercy," he shows himself the heir in painting of the traditions of Savonarola. Many of Bartolommeo's altar-pieces have grown very black, and have lost much of their effect by being removed from the churches for which they were painted; but enough is left in Florence to show his greatness. With him was associated that gay Bohemian and wild liver, Mariotto Albertinelli (1474-1515), who deserted painting to become an innkeeper, and who frequently worked in partnership with the friar. Andrea del Sarto, the tailor's son who loved not wisely but too well, is the last of a noble line of heroic craftsmen. Although his work lacks all inspiration, he is one of the greatest of colourists. "Andrea del Sarto," writes Mr Berenson, "approached, perhaps, as closely to a Giorgione or a Titian as could a Florentine, ill at ease in the neighbourhood of Leonardo and Michelangelo." He entirely belongs to these closing days of the Republic; his earliest frescoes were painted during Soderini's gonfalonierate; his latest just before the great siege.

In the Carnival of 1511 a wonderfully grim pageant was shown to the Florentines, and it was ominous of coming events. It was known as the Carro della Morte, and had been designed with much secrecy by Piero di Cosimo. Drawn by buffaloes, a gigantic black chariot, all painted over with dead men's bones and white crosses, slowly passed through the streets. Upon the top of it, there stood a large figure of Death with a scythe in her hand; all round her, on the chariot, were closed coffins. When at intervals the Triumph paused, harsh and hoarse trumpet-blasts sounded; the coffins opened, and horrible figures, attired like skeletons, half issued forth. "We are dead," they sang, "as you see. So shall we see you dead. Once we were even as you are, soon shall you be as we." Before and after the chariot, rode a great band of what seemed to be mounted deaths, on the sorriest steeds that could be found. Each bore a great black banner with skull and cross-bones upon it, and each ghastly cavalier was attended by four skeletons with black torches. Ten black standards followed the Triumph; and, as it slowly moved on, the whole procession chanted the Miserere. Vasari tells us that this spectacle, which filled the city with terror and wonder, was supposed to signify the return of the Medici to Florence, which was to be "as it were, a resurrection from death to life."

And, sure enough, in the following year the Spaniards under Raimondo da Cardona fell upon Tuscany, and, after the horrible sack and massacre of Prato, reinstated the Cardinal Giovanni dei Medici and Giuliano in Florence–their elder brother, Piero, had been drowned in the Garigliano eight years before. Piero Soderini went into exile, the Greater Council was abolished, and, while the city was held by their foreign troops, the Medici renewed the old pretence of summoning a parliament to grant a balìa to reform the State. At the beginning of 1513 two young disciples of Savonarola, Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, resolved to imitate Brutus and Cassius, and to liberate Florence by the death of the Cardinal and his brother. Their plot was discovered, and they died on the scaffold. "Get this Brutus out of my head for me," said Boscoli to Luca della Robbia, kinsman of the great sculptor, "that I may meet my last end like a Christian"; and, to the Dominican friar who confessed him, he said, "Father, the philosophers have taught me how to bear death manfully; do you help me to bear it out of love for Christ." In this same year the Cardinal Giovanni was elected Pope, and entered upon his splendid and scandalous pontificate as Leo X. "Let us enjoy the Papacy," was his maxim, "since God has given it to us."

Although Machiavelli was ready to serve the Medici, he had been deprived of his posts at the restoration, imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of being concerned in Boscoli's conspiracy, and now, released in the amnesty granted by the newly elected Pope, was living in poverty and enforced retirement at his villa near San Casciano. It was now that he wrote his great books, the Principe and the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. Florence was ruled by the Pope's nephew, the younger Lorenzo, son of Piero by Alfonsina Orsini. The government was practically what it had been under the Magnificent, save that this new Lorenzo, who had married a French princess, discarded the republican appearances which his grandfather had maintained, and surrounded himself with courtiers and soldiers. For him and for Giuliano, the Pope cherished designs of carving out large princedoms in Italy; and Machiavelli, in dedicating his Principe first to Giuliano, who died in 1516, and then to Lorenzo, probably dreamed that some such prince as he described might drive out the foreigner and unify the nation. In his nobler moments Leo X., too, seems to have aspired to establish the independence of Italy. When Lorenzo died in 1519, leaving one daughter, who was afterwards to be the notorious Queen of France, there was no direct legitimate male descendant of Cosimo the elder left; and the Cardinal Giulio, son of the elder Giuliano, governed Florence with considerable mildness, and even seemed disposed to favour a genuine republican government, until a plot against his life hardened his heart. It was to him that Machiavelli, who was now to some extent received back into favour, afterwards dedicated his Istorie Fiorentine. In 1523 the Cardinal Giulio, in spite of his illegitimate birth, became Pope Clement VII., that most hapless of Pontiffs, whose reign was so surpassingly disastrous to Italy. In Florence the Medici were now represented by two young bastards, Ippolito and Alessandro, the reputed children of the younger Giuliano and the younger Lorenzo respectively; while the Cardinal Passerini misruled the State in the name of the Pope. But more of the true Medicean spirit had passed into the person of a woman, Clarice, the daughter of Piero (and therefore the sister of the Duke Lorenzo), who was married to the younger Filippo Strozzi, and could ill bear to see her house end in these two base-born lads. And elsewhere in Italy Giovanni delle Bande Nere (as he was afterwards called, from the mourning of his soldiers for his death) was winning renown as a captain; he was the son of that Giovanni dei Medici with whom Piero had quarrelled, by Caterina Sforza, the Lady of Forlì, and had married Maria Salviati, a grand-daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent. But the Pope would rather have lost Florence than that it should fall into the hands of the younger line.

But the Florentine Republic was to have a more glorious sunset. In 1527, while the imperial troops sacked Rome, the Florentines for the third time expelled the Medici and re-established the Republic, with first Niccolò Capponi and then Francesco Carducci as Gonfaloniere. In this sunset Machiavelli died; Andrea del Sarto painted the last great Florentine fresco; Michelangelo returned to serve the State in her hour of need. The voices of the Piagnoni were heard again from San Marco, and Niccolò Capponi in the Greater Council carried a resolution electing Jesus Christ king of Florence. But the plague fell upon the city; and her liberty was the price of the reconciliation of Pope and Emperor. From October 1529 until August 1530, their united forces–first under the Prince of Orange and then under Ferrante Gonzaga–beleaguered Florence. Francesco Ferrucci, the last hope of the Republic, was defeated and slain by the imperialists near San Marcello; and then, betrayed by her own infamous general Malatesta Baglioni, the city capitulated on the understanding that, although the form of the government was to be regulated and established by the Emperor, her liberty was preserved. The sun had indeed set of the most noble Republic in all history.

Alessandro dei Medici, the reputed son of Lorenzo by a mulatto woman, was now made hereditary ruler of Florence by the Emperor, whose illegitimate daughter he married, and by the Pope. For a time, the Duke behaved with some decency; but after the death of Clement in 1534, he showed himself in his true light as a most abominable tyrant, and would even have murdered Michelangelo, who had been working upon the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo. "It was certainly by God's aid," writes Condivi, "that he happened to be away from Florence when Clement died." Alessandro appears to have poisoned his kinsman, the Cardinal Ippolito, the other illegitimate remnant of the elder Medicean line, in whom he dreaded a possible rival. Associated with him in his worst excesses was a legitimate scion of the younger branch of the house, Lorenzino–the Lorenzaccio of Alfred de Musset's drama–who was the grandson of the Lorenzo di Pier Francesco mentioned in the previous chapter.25 On January 5th, 1537, this young man–a reckless libertine, half scholar and half madman–stabbed the Duke Alessandro to death with the aid of a bravo, and fled, only to find a dishonourable grave some ten years later in Venice.

Florence now fell into the hands of the ablest and most ruthless of all her rulers, Cosimo I. (the son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere), who united Medicean craft with the brutality of the Sforzas, conquered Siena, and became the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. At the opening of his reign the Florentine exiles, headed by the Strozzi and by Baccio Valori, attempted to recover the State, but were defeated by Cosimo's mercenaries. Their leaders were relentlessly put to death; and Filippo Strozzi, after prolonged torture, was either murdered in prison or committed suicide. A word will be said presently, in chapter ix., on Cosimo's descendants, the Medicean Grand Dukes who reigned in Tuscany for two hundred years.

The older generation of artists had passed away with the Republic. After the siege Michelangelo alone remained, compelled to labour upon the Medicean tombs in San Lorenzo, which have become a monument, less to the tyrants for whom he reared them, than to the saeva indignatio of the great master himself at the downfall of his country. A madrigal of his, written either in the days of Alessandro or at the beginning of Cosimo's reign, expresses what was in his heart. Symonds renders it:–

"Lady, for joy of lovers numberlessThou wast created fair as angels are;Sure God hath fallen asleep in heaven afar,When one man calls the bliss of many his."

But the last days and last works of Michelangelo belong to the story of Rome rather than to that of Florence. Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo (1494-1557), who had been Andrea del Sarto's scholar, and whose earlier works had been painted before the downfall of the Republic, connects the earlier with the later Cinquecento; but of his work, as of that of his pupil Angelo Bronzino (1502-1572), the portraits alone have any significance for us now. Giorgio Vasari (1512-1574), although painter and architect–the Uffizi and part of the Palazzo Vecchio are his work–is chiefly famous for his delightful series of biographies of the artists themselves. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), that most piquant of personalities, and the Fleming Giambologna or Giovanni da Bologna (1524-1608), the master of the flying Mercury, are the last noteworthy sculptors of the Florentine school. When Michelangelo–Michel, più che mortale, Angel divino, as Ariosto calls him–passed away on February 18th, 1564, the Renaissance was over as far as Art was concerned. And not in Art only. The dome of St Peter's, that was slowly rising before Michelangelo's dying eyes, was a visible sign of the new spirit that was moving within the Church itself, the spirit that reformed the Church and purified the Papacy, and which brought about the renovation of which Savonarola had prophesied.