CALAMITY OF CONTENTMENT

”The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of imagination.” ( G.K Chesterton )

Annunciazione, Botticelli

In permissive societies the revolution often swings the other way and the transition from, permissive, seemingly open minded liberalism can turn into conservative authoritarianism. So it happened in Florence in the fifteenth century. It is difficult to fathom the turnaround of Medici controlled Florence  into the society of  religious fundamentalists it became under Savonarola, under whose auspices occurred the famous Burning of the Vanities of 1497-98. ”Vanities” were confiscated, pitched onto the street, mutilated, piled into baskets, then carted into a public square for the great public bonfires.

Fra Girolamo was a crusader,a populist in opposing the Borgia papacy and its comfortable marriage of convenience with the Medici’s. Savonarola was little different from the earlier preachers except in his ability to exploit a particular set of political and religious circumstances. The overthrow of the Medici left Florentine politics very unsettled and faction-ridden. There was growing class conflict between the rich and ostentatious ruling elites of  Florence, and an increasingly bitter working and middle class.For the most part, his most ardent followers were young and idealistic; a profile that has always been the ready prey of older moral reformers of both the left and right.They were usually adolecent boys between 12 and 19 who wore brush cut hair, were somberly attired and participated in overbearing, spectacular, religious processions that resembled a gala for God’s army. They also beat and stoned prostitutes and ransacked bars and clubs.  What Savonarola could not accomplish through moral suasion, he achieved through intimidation.The goal was to turn Florence into the New Jerusalem, a center of religious awakening throughout Europe.

”In our age where religious doctrine now plays the role that political ideology did in the 20th century, Savonarola is a very familiar type.   He was the charismatic religious leader, ruthless ideologue, and cunning politician all in one.  He exploited popular resentments against corrupt rulers.  He told his followers that they were really saints of God no matter what their enemies said about them.  He told his followers that God would avenge the wrongs they suffered.  He created solidarity by a sense of constant threat.”

One still wonders how such an extraordinary figure as Savonarola was able to exert such power, given that Florence was the heart of that great cultural surge known as the Italian Renaissance. He was a fiery orator who touched the nerves of materialism, corruption and hardened sin. There was also a pervading millenialist dread as the year 1500 approached. Martin Luther was to appear not long afterward and declare Savonarola a precursor of Protestant doctrine and a martyr of the Reformation. Wasted by fasting and the vigil of nightly visions, Savonarola would fall into a trance, rapt in a kind of ecstasy at the pulpit, raising the people,s fervor to flood levels. Men and women of every age and class would fall into passionate tears. How could the Florentines, a people so passionate about culture submit to the yoke of such ascetic doctrines? Part was  due, to a sincere authenticity that Savonarola had the gift to articulate, and a sincere belief that he had a calling to put Christianity back on its rightful course.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Moses, for the Tomb of Pope Julius II, 1513-1515.

The idea of coercive group psychology and implementing attitudinal change such as Savonarola achieved has long fascinated researchers. Like the Friar, these experiments showed that once a tipping point in attitude is reached the actions of the participants can attain a point where their behavior develops a life of its own and can no longer be retained, and is sustained only by increasing stimulus in which limiting the degree of tragedy and destruction appear the only viable options.

Zimbardo Prison Experiment, 1971

The “Zimbardo Prison Experiment” was an experiment conceived and conducted in 1971 by Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo from Stanford . Twenty-four undergraduates out of seventy were selected to play the roles of both guards and prisoners in a simulated prison setting. These people, going into the experiment, lacked psychological, crime history, and medical disabilities. Zimbardo’s goal was to analyze the reactions of both the acting, or role playing prisoners and guards over time. Zimbardo was surprised, a somewaht disturbed by observing that most prisoners and guards had adapted their surroundings, internalized their roles, and assuming the new identitie, for better or worse, in almost seamless transition. Their behavior was indistinguishable from those of  real prisoners and guards. One third of the guards were judged to have clinical sadistic tendencies and a majority of the prisoners were emotionally traumatized. The environment was spiraling out of control forcing Zimbardo to cut off the project after six days.

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Botticelli, Mystical Nativity

”Although the intent of the experiment was to examine captivity, its result has been used to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of seniority/authority…. Professor Zimbardo acknowleges that he was not merely an observer in the experiment but an active participant and in some cases it is clear he was influencing the direction the experiment went…. For example, Professor Zimbardo cites the fact that all of the “guards” wore sunglasses as an example of their dehumanization. However, the sunglasses were not spontaneously chosen as apparel by the students; they were given to them by Professor Zimbardo. The student “guards” were also issued batons by Professor Zimbardo on their first day, which may have predisposed them to consider physical force as an acceptable means of running the “prison”.”

Savonarola, woodcut 1495

Clearly, Savonarola knew that the power of conformity in groups, was instinctual and could be molded by an authority process. The issue is whether the means he employed justified the ends he pursued in saving humanity from a calamity of contentment. He likely did feel that the glow transfiguring the Florentine sky from the bonfires ,was the dawn of a younger and wiser world; a post apocalyptic vision.

”Probably he did hate the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that is precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist. He saw, that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms; that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics and Puritans in old times. … Ascetics are sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less….He was making war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which all creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the sign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally anti-aesthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli, and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else.

Botticelli, Madonna and Child and Two Angels

”Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear. We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola–a hedonism that is more sick of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modern works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The bankrupt and depraved imagination does not see that a living man is far more dramatic than a dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the Medici, goes the falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for the strong man which is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is worshipped as he is worshipped by the readers of the “Bow Bells Novelettes,” and for the same reason–a profound sense of personal weakness. That tendency to devolve our duties descends on us, which is the soul of slavery, alike whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs or emperors. Against all this the great clerical republican stands in everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival’s success. The issue is still between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and the license of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security of silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. The supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among us, men for whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the moment, men to whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp and wintry spring. They have an art, a literature, a political philosophy, which are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon the taste, not for what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their statuettes and sonnets are rounded and perfect, while “Macbeth” is in comparison a fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint… And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoils into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.

Moderation was scarcely Savonarola’s virtue, any more than compromise was one of his principles. The excesses, hedonism of the Medici’s were a gaping target. What is known about Botticelli, is that after he was converted by Savonarola, his canvases became far fewer, his Venus disappearing from them along with her spirit, and his mood and style darkening with a kind of acid sorrow.

Scarcely four months after the first burning in 1497, the papal bull excommunicated Savonarola, though he defiantly resumed preaching after six months silence. His fall was swifter than his rise. The Pope declared his doctrines were heresies. Public opinion was now marshaled against him from all sides, essentially from Rome and powerful noblemen. The pre-Lent carnival times of the Medici’s of drunkenness and debauchery were encouraged and abetted. At the burning of the vanities in 1498, the procession was harried and disrupted by street roving bullies of the Compagnacci faction, who stripped some boys of their white robes, knocked the red crosses from their hands, struck them with sticks, and pelted them with stones and dead cats. and he met his death on a gallows pole and then burned with two other Friars.”According to one diarist, a young man heckled the dying Savonarola as he hung on the gallows, then grabbed a torch from the executioner and lit the fire shouting, “He who wanted to burn me is now himself put to the flames!’ ” It was a return to business as usual and the comfortable collusion between wealth, power and religion.