Savonarola: Those Who Destroy Art

Section from my book: Evolution Through Art

Piero de' Medici's Downfall

 King Charles VIII of France asked for safe passage through Florence, and Piero de' Medici hesitated to answer for days. Finally, without consultation, he privately met with King Charles and gave away several fortified cities, including Pisa, to the King. When the Florentines heard the terms, they revolted and threw out the hapless Piero the Unfortunate and sacked his properties. After two short years at the helm he destroyed the Medici flagship in Florence. His weakness opened the door for the infamous puritanical zealot Girolamo Savonarola, who under the guise of idealism was out to destroy the humanistic elements of the Italian Renaissance and if possible guarantee that they would have no place in the future.

Figure 29 Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503-06. Louvre, Paris If Savonarola had continued to live, the Mona Lisa might never have come into being.

SAVONAROLA

 Girolamo Savonarola was born in 1452, the same year as Leonardo da Vinci. He grew up in a wealthy physician's family, and his father made sure he was very well educated. Portraits of  Savonarola show a bony face, a large and dominant beak-like nose, a weak chin, a recessed thin upper lip over a large sensual protruding and muscular lower lip, delicate eyebrows, and small beady eyes. His youth was marked by idealism laced with intense moralism. At 20 he wrote On the Ruin of the World and three years later On the Ruin of the Clergy, with their themes of denouncing paganism and the immorality of clergy, which would run through his sermons and letters until he was executed.

Sometime before 1475, Savonarola had a marriage suit rejected, according to his brother. After that he decided to join the Dominican Order. Upon leaving home he wrote his father: "Like you, I am made of flesh and my sensuality wars against my reason; I have a cruel fight to keep the devil from my back."[1] The friars of the Dominican Order were ascetics who renounced wealth, sex, heresy, and paganism. Can anyone purge sensuality from their system? Savonarola would also try by stamping it out in others, and what better way than by destroying the material manifestation of love: art.

What Was at Stake: Art, Sensuality, and Love

Years ago I took a survey of twenty people asking questions like: Have you ever fallen in love at first sight? Have you ever fallen in love with an artwork? There was a fascinating uniform connection: those who had fallen in love with a person and had also fallen in love with an artwork; and the opposite was also true, as those who had not felt romantic love also had never felt it for an artwork. About 75% had felt love; the remaining 25% had not. The connection between love and art wasn't just something true for myself and my artist friends, but it manifested in non-artists as well.

This love connection in art is crucially important to our human development. Through art humans can experience what love feels like, and they can do this in the privacy of their own minds. Think of the deep emotional feelings you have had for your favorite book, movie, song, poem, sculpture, or painting. In a unique way, art offers you a virtual reality, an opportunity to get your feet wet, to experience variations of what love and other important states are like before you try them with real people. If you have not yet felt love, a great tool is to go to a museum and mull about until a work touches your heart. Then stop and stay with that painting or sculpture, observing everything about it, and asking yourself, "What are the triggers that touch me so deeply?"  It is an exercise in examining your inner network of thoughts, emotions, and sensuality. Later, in real life you will recognize, be comfortable with, and have confidence in these familiar patterns.

Graven Images

A deep personal love for art is very powerful. Once you experience it, come heaven or high water, it is nearly impossible to renounce it. There is virtually nothing your teachers, parents, friends, or priests can do about it. For religious sects that want to guide or even control you, art can be their enemy, unless they have full control over the artists' subjects, themes, and approval. Then they can feel reasonably safe that art will funnel your aesthetic responses toward their religious systems.

But some art, like the figurative nude, is a bridge too far, and that is a core reason why Jews, Christians, and Muslims have a commandment that “Thou shalt not make any graven image.” Figurative art is material, sensual, and can represent eudaemonia (human flourishing). That is precisely what needs to be destroyed by those religions that are, in their extreme forms, committed to anti-materialism, anti-sensuality, and anti-humanism. They are not worried about a possession of art as such, but if you connect directly with "outsider" art, and use it to flourish within, then they have no control over you. Their power relies on the hope that you never reach that stage of development. Savonarola knew art was a threat, and he actively worked to get the Florentines to renounce their private feelings of joy, light, and love for art; he directed them towards communal celebrations of his conception of God's severe, self-denying agenda.

The Wedge Driven by Plato and Socrates

Savonarola's asceticism for reality and idealism of the spiritual world was influenced by pagan and Christian concepts going as far back as Plato, 400 BC. In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates says:

The soul reasons best when none of these senses troubles it, neither hearing nor sight, nor pain nor pleasure, but when it is most by itself, taking leave of the body and as far as possible having no contact or association with it in its search for reality … He will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears and, in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it.[2]

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[1] Translated from Girolamo Savonarola, Lettere e Scritti apologetici eds. Ridolfi, Romano, Verde (Rome, 1984), p. 6.

[2] Plato, Grube, G.M.A., 1977, Hackett Publishing Co., Indianapolis, (Plato & Grube, Phaedo, 1977),