Savonarola: Bonfire of the Vanities

[Ecurb]

Years ago, on a business trip, I sat next to a woman who was a history professor, specializing in the Florentine Renaissance. I mentioned to her that it seemed to me that modern academics had made Savonarola the villain of the Florentine Renaissance, and Lorenzo the Magnificent one of its heroes. This (I said) seemed strange from an American perspective (don’t we worship “democracy”).

“Maybe so,” she said. “But what about the great evil of all of those Botticelli paintings burned in the Bonfire of the Vanities?”

“But didn’t Botticelli throw his own paintings on the bonfire?” I asked.

The history professor couldn’t be persuaded – her modernist, (probably) atheistic, and artistic world view deplored the destruction of great art, and didn’t (it seems to me) quite understand what Savonarola was getting at. She probably studied Florentine history BECAUSE she loved the art.

Savonarola (whose friends included Michael Angelo and Botticelli) did ask artists to destroy their “vanities”. Such vanities include not only art, but science. They include the notion that new art, discoveries and inventions not only add to ancient truths, but supplant them. For Savonarola, Christianity and democracy were alike in that both demand personal responsibility.

The good is enemy of the best. Happiness (at least, satisfaction) led to the Fall in Eden. Artistic achievement (or scientific achievement, or business achievement) can lead humans to hedonism. Lorenzo Medici (perhaps) symbolizes achievement in art, literature, and politics, and he symbolizes hedonism. Savonarola was a political failure. But he saw that not only are some things more important than success, but also that success and satisfaction can be the enemy of joy.

(Disclaimer: I’m no expert on the Florentine Renaissance; I refer here to the mythical Savonarola and Lorenzo, and don’t doubt they were both sinners in their actual lives.)

[stlukesguild]

As an artist, I have little or no use for Savonarola. Yes, like the later Protestant leaders in Germany and the Puritans in Europe he preached against the decadence and corruption of the wealthy and the aristocracy... but was this more than pandering to the masses? He was an iconoclastic fanatic not much removed from the Puritan (Puritanical) fanatics in England and later America... or even ISIS and the religious Neo-Con's in the United States.

Michelangelo was but a teenager when he first came to known Savonarola. Savonarola's rhetoric against the pope and kings were probably in keeping with the sympathies of the young, passionate Michelangelo, but Savonarola's crusade against the arts surely frightened him and other artists. He likely avoided participation in Savonarola's "Bonfire of the Vanities" focusing, as he was, upon sculpture, as opposed to painting (much more difficult to drag to the bonfires) and his sympathies seem to have been tempered by his experience and education in the Medici Court. One need only look at Michelangelo's youthful Bacchus that clearly owes far more to the Medici and the Renaissance of Greco-Roman ideals and mythologies, as well as to the sensuality of alcohol and eroticism, than it does to the Puritanism of Savonarola:

http://www.cambridgeblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/bacchus.jpg

Botticelli may have been a greater loss. Vasari undoubtedly exaggerated Savonarola's influence on the artist, claiming he game up painting altogether and fell into poverty. There are, on the contrary, many paintings by Botticelli after falling under the influence of Savonarola. Most of these exhibit a greater emphasis upon piety and spirituality and suffering:

http://photogallerys.ru/art/01/artonline916.jpg
-Lamentations Over the Dead Christ

https://40.media.tumblr.com/b48e2c20b46fc401957ec645f8da2043/tumblr_ntrri4uUwg1uradzdo1_500.jpg
-Agony in the Garden

https://40.media.tumblr.com/512dfe591100e5f4755080db7813cc34/tumblr_ntrrj234SO1uradzdo1_540.jpg
-Holy Trinity

https://40.media.tumblr.com/1cf8be9c259a9d10a92a2265abf672c6/tumblr_ntrrk8dCx61uradzdo1_500.jpg
-Mystic Nativity

As fine as these paintings may be, they lack the sensuality, the polish, and the sheer innovation of his earlier "secular" works:

https://41.media.tumblr.com/560afd88ee6a4c168c0d86ef2fa6f1eb/tumblr_ntrs46jlVt1uradzdo1_540.jpg
-Madonna of the Pomegranate

https://40.media.tumblr.com/6034ef01c88113eda504f0e21122c1c9/tumblr_ntrs545NXX1uradzdo1_540.jpg
-Madonna of the Magnificat

https://40.media.tumblr.com/df72ee8e731435399f815c767cbb2739/tumblr_ntrs9ePxar1uradzdo1_540.jpg
-Venus and Mars

https://41.media.tumblr.com/928e5920ccc3629c9553a245f97507a5/tumblr_ntrrumG7WH1uradzdo1_540.jpg
-The Birth of Venus

https://36.media.tumblr.com/ead110c448141d0d01aa4efde4436bc6/tumblr_ntrrtt98wV1uradzdo1_540.jpg
-Primavera

The Birth of Venus and Primavera are especially important not only for their poetic realization of Greco-Roman mythologies, but also for their revival of the female nude sans any suggestions of sin. They are essentially the first paintings in 1000 years to have taken pleasure in the flesh... where Savonarola wrote of being troubled by the desires of the flesh and sought to cleans himself of such thoughts through cleansing in an icy shower.

Savonarola's Puritanical preaching against the pleasures of the flesh may not have been the sole influence upon Botticelli's more toward a more spiritual & pious art. One might also assume that as the artist aged and faced his own mortality, his thoughts might have shifted. There is also a suggestion that Botticelli grew increasingly mournful over the early death of Simonetta Vespucci... the "most beautiful woman in Florence"... whom Botticelli had painted many years earlier (and who it was rumored) he was in love with.

https://36.media.tumblr.com/3a1e29be5e705f2cb04186ee1f290d89/tumblr_ntrsbmuKU31uradzdo1_500.jpg

Botticelli had requested to be buried at Simonetta's feet in the Church of Ognissanti - the parish church of the Vespucci - in Florence. His wish was in fact carried out when he died some 34 years after her death.

[Ecurb]

As an artist, I have little or no use for Savonarola......

Well, yes, I don't imagine that Savonarola furthered Florentine art (although I do imagine someone could have made a great painting depicting the Bonfire of the Vanities). However, Savonarola's point was that artists are also something that is more important than artists: they are human beings. When they start seeing their identity as "artists" as more important than their identity as "humans" (Savonarola would argue), it's time to stoke the bonfire.

Of course neither I nor (perhaps) you are religious, but even from a merely artistic perspective it seems to me that the story of great artists renouncing their vanities by casting their masterpieces onto the bonfire is as emotionally resonant and evocative as any of Botticelli's paintings.

The rebirth of Humanism in the Renaissance owed something (as stluke astutely pointed out) to Botticelli's depiction of "Venus Rising". But perhaps it owed even more to Savonarola's Republicanism, and to his notion that people are more important than paintings. Democracy is more difficult than despotism, just as Christianity is more difficult than paganism. The pagan might burn his masterpieces as an offering to propitiate the Gods; the Florentine Christians burned them to renounce their own sins.

It's a shame (I suppose) that masterpieces were burnt; but it's possible that the glow from that fire was brighter and more illuminating than the paintings that fed it.