On the contrary, pious and genuinely religious art would have been an efficacious support in building up that ideal State which he dreamt of, and for a while even made a reality.' [43] Within the Dominican Order Savonarola was repackaged as an innocuous, purely devotional figure ("the evolving image of a Counter-Reformation saintly prelate"[44]), and in this benevolent and unthreatening guise his memory lived on. Unknown to Lorenzo, Savonarola would soon become his most dangerous enemy. Roeder, Ralph Edmund LeClercq "The Man of the Renaissance: Four Lawgivers, Savanarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Aretino", The Viking Press, 1933. This he summed up in the theological virtue of caritas, or love. Indicatively, one of the reasons Savonarola gave for abandoning preaching was that his sermons were so ineffectual they ‘couldn’t even have frightened a chicken’.
Despite Lorenzo’s best efforts, these inevitably reflected the underhand pacts between the stronger of the negotiating allies. He would go on to dedicate his Apology to Lorenzo, and upon reading Lorenzo’s poetry he judged it superior to that of Dante – its humanism more reflective of the age than Dante’s religious subjects.fn4, Ficino was deeply grateful that such a distinguished scholar as Pico della Mirandola should champion his Platonism in the face of the vehement criticism it was receiving from some orthodox Aristotelians. How does Amazon calculate star ratings? However, with little support from the traditional Medici allies in Bologna and Milan (the latter being convulsed by power struggles among the Milanese ruling family, the Sforza),[13] the war dragged on, and only diplomacy by Lorenzo, who personally traveled to Naples, ultimately resolved the crisis. Pero ahora, ante el umbral de la eternidad, Lorenzo quiso que Savonarola acudiera a su lecho de muerte, ya que era ‘el único fraile honesto’ que conocía. Translation of letter from fra Girolamo to his mother, 25 January 1490, Girolamo Savonarola, A Guide to Righteous Living and Other Works, Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto, 2003) 38–41. Laurent de Médicis (en italien Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici : « Laurent, fils de Pierre de Médicis »), surnommé Laurent le Magnifique (Lorenzo il Magnifico), né à Florence le 1 er janvier 1449 et mort dans la même ville le 8 avril 1492, est un homme d'État florentin et le dirigeant de facto de la République florentine durant la Renaissance. Weinstein, Donald "Savonarola the Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet" (New Haven, 2011). Pico’s quest to understand the early religious ideas that had inspired Christianity had extended beyond Judaism to include the ideas of the Ancient Greek philosophers. Yet as we shall see, Savonarola’s informed discussions and critiques of such thinkers would later play an integral part in Pico’s beliefs. These spices had been shipped from the eastern Mediterranean; and despite stiff competition from Venice and Genoa, Medici agents had penetrated Egypt as well as other trading centres throughout the Levant. In the event, Lorenzo the Magnificent simply did not have 61,400 florins with which to pay off his cousins, and instead was forced to hand over to them the Medici villa at Cafaggiolo, and further much-treasured ancestral land, property and farms in the Mugello valley, across the mountains to the north of Florence, the original homeland of the Medici.
One of his fellow monks recounts how he would arrive to give his morning lessons with his eyes swollen from the weeping that had overcome him during the night-long vigils and hours of fervent meditation that he imposed upon himself.