Savonarola and the Renaissance

The contrast between Savonarola and his times was not as vivid as had been imagined. Much of what he stood for was but the logical corollary to many of the aspirations of Renaissance men, a fact which explains in more than one way the success he enjoyed in the Florence of the Medici. Such a success in that town is even more remarkable when one realises that Savonarola was not a Florentine by birth. This must be pointed out, since the inhabitants of Florence looked down upon the other Italians as inferior beings, who behaved boorishly and spoke in absurdly ridiculous dialects. He came instead from Ferrara in north Italy. Now during the fifteenth century Ferrara was in more than one way the capital of the north Italian Renaissance. Yet Savonarola’s home atmosphere was by no means that of Cossa’s dazzling frescoes in the Schifanoia palace. What instead dominated it was the rigid puritanism of his grandfather, the court physician Michele Savonarola, a narrow scholar still intellectually in the middle ages. Michele saw to his grandson’s upbringing, and from him the young Savonarola acquired a remarkable taste for Holy Scripture. Still the attraction of Petrarch’s love lyric did not by-pass him altogether.