Fra Girolamo Savonarola Illustrated depicts the intriguing figure of a Dominican friar turned politician during the De Medici rule in the State of Florence at the end of 1400 C.E.
Born Girolamo Savonarola in 1452 in the Duchy of Ferrara, son of a doctor, Savonarola was well fed and educated by his grandfather Michele, also a well renowned doctor. He was initiated in the study of medicine, but then switched to pursue liberal arts, then to receive training in Aristotelian philosophy.
At age 23 Savonarola left his parents' house never to return. He later wrote a remarkable letter full of tenderness to his mother expressing the need to distance himself from a society festered with evil. He felt a void in his soul, he mentioned. Apologetically, and with extreme humility, he wrote that he decided to become a friar, living in poverty at the service of God. Savonarola was very unattractive, with an aquiline nose, but his dark eyes, almost hypnotic, and his passion for honesty and a just society made him look like an angel with a mask on his face concealing something extraordinary.
During the papacy of Alexander VI, and Lorenzo De Medici at the Palazzo, Savonarola became particularly sensitive to the tyrannical abuses of the Church and the government. He started preaching, first, as he mentioned in his notes, to a few women and simpletons. As his sermons became more toxic, especially toward the public figures, his crowd grew exponentially, with elite figures like Machiavelli, Pico Della Mirandola, and Lorenzo De Medici (later an enemy) attending Savonarola's passionate spectacles.
His lack of experience and, according to Machiavelli, military might, changed his vision as he became more ambitious; he couldn't hold office, but technically was a politician, and fell out of grace when in Florence became officially persona non-grata. After a failed excommunication from Pope Alexander VI, and a failed trial by fire for no-show (in which Savonarola had to perform a miracle), and the fall of the Piero De Medici (brother of Lorenzo who succeeded him after his suspicious death at age 44 in 1494: such date marks the beginning of anni miserabili for the history of Italy, according to Francesco Guicciardini, an Italian statesman and historian, 1483-1550, Florence), Gli Arrabbiati (the maddened), a political party against Savonarola saw an opportunity to frame their political enemy. Mobs successfully stormed the office of the friar at St. Mark's church and arrested Savonarola for heresy. He spent in silence his last days in his cell expounding on paper the validity of his doctrines against his attackers, and in 1498, after a trial packed with drama and with a myriad of forgeries which lasted eight months, Savonarola was hanged and burned in the Piazza Della Signoria in Florence.
Savonarola wrote and published treatises of Aristotelian philosophy, for the most part general notes for his sermons, and a few poems. For this reason, he is often mentioned in a sort-of hall of fame of influential thinkers and writers labelled as humanists of the so called first period of modern philosophy.
