Being Erased
Art may seem innocuous to many people, but it can trigger unexpected reactions. One of the most disturbing is when someone feels compelled to destroy art. To bystanders, there is a particular feeling associated with witnessing art’s destruction—unlike seeing a bridge or a car destroyed, or even planned demolitions of old buildings. Those feelings might be anger if it is your car, fear if it is caused by an invading army, and delight if it is a harmless and brilliant technical execution. But seeing art destroyed causes an altogether different feeling in the pit of your stomach—a mixture of fear of the senseless or insane, with an odd feeling that the attack is personal. Compare book burnings: even if we hate the actual books, burning them creates the uneasy feeling that somehow a part of us is being erased. And the normal reaction is to rescue the books from the flames before its perspectives are lost to us forever. So it is with painting and sculpture.
The Spanish Inquisition
VELÁSQUEZ
The artists Diego Velázquez (b. 1599–d. 1660) and Rembrandt were contemporaries and the greatest painters of their respective countries, Catholic Spain and Protestant Netherlands. Likely they never saw each other’s works, yet they had many similarities in their conceptions of light and shadow, powerfully abstracted compositions, human empathy, and an interest in myths and realism. The influence of the Italian Renaissance migrated west and north and influenced young Spanish and Dutch artists. While Rembrandt would not have felt censored in the north, Velázquez was painting in the middle of the three-centuries-old Spanish Inquisition, infamous for its corporal penalties for heresy. There was also the hypocritical divide between the royalty, the church, and the people, with a different set of standards and morals for each group. Velázquez was the top court painter and under the protection of King Philip IV, but he would have been keenly aware of looming torture if he took too much artistic license.
The Spanish Inquisition forced Muslims and Jews to renounce their faiths and become Catholics. Not trusting they would comply privately, the Inquisition looked for any small signs of deviation to accuse them of heresy. It also had severe punishments for humanist deviants. The Inquisition could torture for any perceived transgression, like eating meat on the wrong days. Velázquez had the King’s protection but served at the King’s pleasure. There would be no quarter for him to escape to and still paint—or even remain alive to tell the tale—if he incurred the King’s wrath.
A Great Humanist
The constraints on Velázquez were enormous, yet he managed to be one of the greatest artists of the human spirit. Dwarfs were part of the royal household and Velazquez painted their portraits, imbuing them with a dignity rarely found in even the world’s greatest portraits. He turned mythological stories into group portraits of local everyday people. The Triumph of Bacchus portrays a group of day workers celebrating with wine; with one sunburned man beaming with joy and smiling ear to ear after a hard day of outdoor labor. He turned what could have been a hopelessly boring royal family portrait, Las Meninas, into arguably the greatest painting ever painted. With its intricately complex composition of dwarfs, animals, mirrors, the royal couple and their children, and, ingeniously, Velázquez himself painting it. It is like everyone's family circus painted with empathy and care; it seems to say, “We are a crazy family, but it is my family and I love them.”
Venus at Her Mirror
Velázquez is known to have painted two nudes, one lost, and this Venus at her Mirror. It was painted on his trip to Italy, far away from the Inquisitor's eyes. It is listed in the collection of Gaspar Méndez de Haro, who at different times was the Spanish Governor of Flanders, Ambassador in Rome, and Viceroy of Naples; he was also known for being from a libertine family. De Haro was an international personage who would have had freedoms not enjoyed by the Spanish populace.
Velázquez’s Venus is a painting of a toned, nude young woman seen from the back with a mirror reflecting her face, alongside a life-like cupid, an affectation of many mythological paintings. But if we put the cupid's wings aside, the scene takes on a touching quality of human universality. Velázquez would have painted the woman and the young child from life. I would bet you anything that this beautiful Italian model was a young mom with her child in tow. And though the mirror was a common device of Venus at her bath, I would speculate that since the model was facing away from the artist, the mirror gave her a feeling of safety by being able to watch what the artist was doing behind her back.
The tones and hues of her body are beautifully varied while simultaneously conveying her shape and luminosity. Notice the curves of both her torso and the child's. Notice the dark rich shadows that flow beside those curves. Long before photography, Velázquez mastered blocking out shadows in an abstract way that foreshadows photography. The shadow that curves around the kid's torso and thigh and the shadow under her thigh and butt are a powerful feat of abstraction. A very sensual element to the painting is the lit area surrounding her earlobe, the soft fleshy area where her jaw meets the nape of her neck. Along with her hair being pulled up, the combination is what most heterosexual men and lesbians will say is one of the most beautiful, delicate, and alluring features of a woman. It is for good reason that a woman will use that wily device of asking her mate to clip the clasp of her necklace to display this attribute to perfection, as Velázquez does here.
Venus at her Mirror represents my concept of the sublime: An integration of idealism, natural realism, authenticity, a beautifully balanced female figure metaphorically representing physically and mentally a healthy vivaciousness, elegant balances, and a nonchalant and unself-conscious confidence. It might capture a brief moment of physical perfection, but it represents what it means to be a beautiful woman inside and out.
And this Venus triggered the sexually repressed, arsonist, Blackshirt fascist, and pseudo-suffragette Mary Richardson to slash it.
Maleficent Mary
In 1914 Mary Richardson strolled into London National Gallery’s imposing monumental viewing room with its magnificent skylight, brocaded wallpaper, and polished parquet floors, approached the 265-year-old Velázquez masterpiece, Venus at her Mirror, waited until no one was near by, pulled out a primitive butcher's axe and viciously and repeatedly slashed the delicately painted back, shoulder, and hip of Venus. The shocked guard slipped on the polished floor or he could have lessened the harm.
The following day The Times quoted Mary Richardson: "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest … If there is an outcry against my deed, let every one remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy … the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy."
Like many con artists, pedophiles, murderers, goons, and politicians who try to hide behind idealistic movements, Maleficent Mary put up a smokescreen that she was merely a soldier of the women's suffrage movement. But a review of her life doesn't lend itself to the idealist's quest for positive political change. She had been arrested nine times for several successful arson attacks, bombing a railroad station, and the slashing of the Venus.
Arsonist
She was born British, but soon thereafter moved to Canada with her mother, where she was brought up by her puritanical grandparents. It is interesting to note that the majority of arsonists show signs of giddy excitement for lighting fires as children. Her grandparents, most likely petrified at the thought of being torched to death in their sleep, sent the unbalanced 16-year-old across the Atlantic back to England—ironically to study art! Undoubtedly not the last family to send a demented family member as far away as humanly possible.
Richardson writes about the first arson attack, at least the first one she was caught doing:
I took the things from her and went on to the mansion. The putty of one of the ground-floor windows was old and broke away easily, and I had soon knocked out a large pane of the glass. When I climbed inside into the blackness it was a horrible moment. The place was frighteningly strange and pitch dark, smelling of damp and decay ... A ghastly fear took possession of me; and, when my face wiped against a cobweb, I was momentarily stiff with fright. But I knew how to lay a fire––I had built many a campfire in my young days––and that part of the work was simple and quickly done. I poured the inflammable liquid over everything; then I made a long fuse of twisted cotton wool, soaking that too as I unwound it and slowly made my way back to the window at which I had entered ... I climbed outside before setting a light to the fuse. For a moment I stood and watched the tiny flame run a few feet; then I hurried off to find the gap in the thorn hedge.[1]
If one reads between the lines, the act of arson could easily be misplaced sexual transference of a repressed virgin on her first forbidden illicit tryst: The putty broken away, the knocked pane of glass, the dark and damp smells, possession of fear, stiff with fright, laying a fire, unwinding a long fuse, lighting it, all simply and quickly done, and then graced with thorns.
Lacking Credibility, Integrity, and Truthfulness
In her three years of serving prison sentences, she went on hunger strikes, and the hapless directors, not sure what to do, force-fed her with feeding tubes––a violation worthy of the symbolism of being raped by the male-dominated institutions. Mary Richardson had never married, though she adopted a boy. After one bout of prison she was sheltered by another suffragette, to whom she wrote a collection of poems Symbol Songs: Songs of Spirit Intimation with the dedication: The Translation of the Love I Bear Lillian Dove.
Presumably she was a Victorian lesbian. Looking at her act of slashing the Venus at her Mirror takes on a fascinating descent into self-hatred. She wasn't destroying the painting for any noble cause: it was a frustrated rebellion against evolving into a worthy human being. She wasn't eliminating a painting, she was eradicating any meager element of humanity left within her.
Like too many people who are destroyers and criminals at heart, she ran for political office in 1922. Thankfully she didn't make headway. Maleficent Mary then went on to join the Nazi-saluting British Union of Fascists, otherwise known as the Blackshirts, and in 1934 became the leader of its women's division. Her directorship was short-lived and she retreated to relative seclusion in Hastings. In 1953 she wrote an autobiographical apologia, Laugh a Defiance. British historian Hilda Kean questions Richardson's credibility, motives, and truthfulness.
She appears to reveal much in the sense of describing illegal activities but in reality discloses very little, other than a penchant for creating exciting yarns … For her the suffrage movement was indeed a fruitful source of myth, which she developed in different guises on different occasions. But her writing about suffrage also seems to have had a personal rationale. She used suffrage stories to construct an identity of constancy and stability in a life characterized by dislocation, disruption and political and personal change.[2]
In 1961, Richardson died.
Poetic Justice
In 1934, while Mary Richardson was high-fiving Blackshirt fascists with the Nazi stiff-arm heiling salute, a German immigrant, art restorer Helmut Ruhemann, carefully and superbly repaired the damage Richardson had done to Venus at her Mirror. Ruhemann, who opposed Hitler and the Nazis, had escaped the National Socialists and migrated to England with his family when Hitler came to power in 1933. British art dealers and directors kept him busy with work on important paintings. During World War II the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery sent many paintings to Wales and entrusted Ruhemann with their safekeeping. He gained a reputation as a leader in modern techniques of using X-rays and completely removing discolored varnishes from old paintings restoring their natural luster as the original artists intended.
In 1969 he was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire, given to individuals for having a prominent role at a national level. He continued on at the National Gallery until 1972 and died the following year at 82.
A noble soul.
Michelangelo's Snowman
In 1488, 14-year-old Michelangelo moved into the Medici palace. Lorenzo de' Medici's son Piero, only a couple of years older, was keenly aware of his father's unconditional support of the sculptor prodigy and his hopes that one day Michelangelo would rival the greatest of the Greek sculptors. Piero likely resented the love and affection that his dad gave to Michelangelo.
Four years later, after Lorenzo’s death, Piero de' Medici ordered that Michelangelo sculpt a snowman. Vasari, Michelangelo's friend and biographer wrote: "It is said that Piero de' Medici, who had been left heir … often used to send for Michelangelo, with whom he had been intimate for many years, when he wanted to buy antiques such as cameos and other engraved stones. And one winter, when a great deal of snow fell in Florence, he had him make in his courtyard a statue of snow, which was very beautiful. ..."[3]
At this time Piero and Michelangelo were respectively about 21 and 18 years old, and Piero de' Medici was now responsible for ruling the vast Medici empire. Michelangelo had already sculpted the superb The Madonna of the Stairs (1490–92), and he would have known his full worth. The gravitas of the Medici situation and Michelangelo's earnestness don't lend themselves to a vastly wealthy and powerful heir frivolously ordering a great sculptor to make a snowman.
Already the Medici empire was crumbling due to Piero’s bad relationships with Florentine elites and his powerful cousins. At the same time Michelangelo was working on innovative sculptures and secretly studying anatomy on cadavers. Years later, in 1544, Niccolò Martelli asked Michelangelo why his sculptures of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano the Elder didn't resemble them, Michelangelo replied that: "a thousand years from now no one would be able to know that they looked otherwise.”[4] Michelangelo wasn’t in art to fiddle with temporal media such as snow, he was in it to have his works live forever.
It must have amused Piero greatly to have Michelangelo, his father's genius prodigy, modeling snow instead of marble. We can easily imagine Piero snickering to himself or with his friends while watching the snowman irretrievably melt away to nothing.
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.
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."[5] 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.[6]
There are surprising back stories to both Plato and Socrates. Both started out as artists: Plato as a student of literature with hopes of being a playwright, and Socrates as a sculptor. Plato as a teenager heard Socrates speaking and decided to become a philosopher. Socrates was born into a stonemason's family and apparently earned his living as a stonemason. Therein might be answers for their disdain for the senses: it is likely they were not very good as artists, as a celebration of and delight in the senses is a mandatory foundation to be a good artist.
The humiliation of being mediocre in a time of the greatest sculptors and playwrights in humankind's history would have left deep scars. They would have both known their strengths were their minds, but the senses would have been their weaknesses. Did they wage an attack on the senses out of a sense of shame? They would not be the first powerful people to hold a grudge due to their inadequacies.
Christian Influences
Savonarola would also have been influenced by Christian sects like Gnosticism (200-400 AD), which “presents a distinction between a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser divinity responsible for creating the material universe.”[7] And from Manicheanism (200-700 AD): “Humanity, the world and the soul are seen as the by-product of the battle between God's proxy, Primal Man, and the devil.”[8] But perhaps the most interesting influence would be Catharism, (1100-1400 AD), which was absorbed by the Dominican Order to which Savonarola belonged.
Cathars
The Cathars referred to themselves as the “Good Christians,” a sect that believed that all things of the material world were evil and the only good was in the spiritual realm. “As the good God's creation was heaven, so the visible world created by Satan was hell … the other evil, responsible for the material world, including man's body … The struggle of the soul with Satan would finally end ... in the body's destruction with all of Satan's handiwork and the soul's ascent into heaven.”[9]
The Cathars also had a built-in hubris, that only a select few were "perfects" and the flock would just have to accept that. “[S]trict practice was confined to a small minority of adepts, the perfect … Cathar believers were able to live ordinary lives while accepting the spiritual ministrations and authority of the perfect.”[10]
The Cathars influenced the founder of the Dominicans, Dominic de Guzmán. He related to their motives of being good Christians by renouncing the material realm (art, sex, money, prestige), especially as it pointedly contrasted with hypocritical pomp and ceremony of the Holy Church. Dominic de Guzmán successfully converted many Cathars to becoming members of the newly created Dominican order of nuns and friars. The renunciation of the material realm would play into Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities and much later into Immanuel Kant's interpretation of the Sublime in aesthetics.
Not the Children
Savonarola, to achieve his aims of dematerializing the hard-playing Florentines, enlisted the services of children. The contemporary, Paolo de Somenzi, listed the number of ten thousand children under the age of fourteen, some as young as six years old. The children had alms bowls and small altars around every corner but they also “held long sticks in their hands so that they [passersby] could not pass without first paying something.”[11] Many eyewitness accounts were glowing in praise of turning children into agents of God, but even then they could not help report on some pushback from parents. Fra Pacifico Burlamacchi (perhaps wrongly attributed) writes, “Nonetheless, these children suffered so many tribulations and persecutions for wanting to live uprightly and to do good works that many wondered why such warfare was waged against them by fathers and mothers. …”[12]
It was a masterful negative PsyOp to recruit children as the agents instead of friars and nuns, as they would have undoubtedly been rejected and likely beaten up by the adults. From Savonarola’s writings on the Bonfire. The children were able to
... admonish anyone who had been found by them in such acts, denouncing him, when this was necessary, to those public magistrates of the city, who held the power to punish such crimes. Whenever they might find women or girls dressed immodestly and without their proper decorum on the public streets or in the churches, they would admonish them in the same way, that is … exhort them to lay aside such vanities for the public good of the city and of their private souls. They would also search their own homes and the homes of our other citizens and encourage anyone found to have vain or lascivious things or things scarcely suitable to a Christian profession to strip themselves of such vanities and curses provoking God’s wrath. ... [13]
Savonarola consoled the fleeced by saying that, "[God] takes away your possessions, He does all for your good, to illuminate you, to purify you, and to incite you toward these spiritual matters, and thus, they will be meant for your healing and not for death. ..."[14]
The Bonfire
By all accounts the pyre was impressive with tiers showing off the material objects. The objects ranged from cosmetics, wigs, and perfume to books, musical instruments, sculptures, and even Sandro Botticelli voluntarily contributed a few of his paintings. It is worth listing the objects by a contemporary's account:
This structure had eight sides, forming a circle, and each side had fifteen steps; upon these fifteen steps were set and arranged all the vanities and lascivious objects … near the steps precious foreign cloths painted with very beautiful … figures were arranged in such a way that it looked like the workshop of a painter; above those cloths there were sculpted figures of the most beautiful women of antiquity and of the most excellent proportion, both Roman and Florentine, portrayed by the great masters of sculpture, such as Donatello and the like … on another step there were musical instruments, such as harps, lutes, citterns, accordions, dulcimers, pipes, cymbals, batons, and horns, together with their books … on another were the books of poets and all sorts of lasciviousness, both Latin and vernacular: Morganti, Petrarch, Dante, the Centonovelle [Decameron] of Boccaccio ...[15]
One of Savonarola's justifications for burning books was, “It would be good for religion if many books that seem useful were destroyed. When there were not so many books and not so many arguments and disputes, religion grew more quickly than it has since."[16]
A contemporary merchant offered to buy the lot, whether out of love for art or for profit, but he would have saved a chunk of art history. “A Venetian merchant went to the Signory and offered twenty thousand ducats [approximately three million dollars in today's currency] for the whole edifice and triumph, if they wanted to sell it to him; he was repaid for his offer by having his portrait placed at the top of this structure on an open seat, as if he were the prince of all these devices.”[17]
In a stunning show of duplicity, Savonarola composed songs for the bonfire procession! Art was fine as long it was approved or created by him. During the bonfire's blaze, sacred music was played accompanied by voices, horns, and bells rising dramatically over the crackling noise of the flames: “The guardians with their lighted torches then came and set fire to it, while the musical instruments of the Signory were sounded along with the trumpets and bells of the palace to give glory, and all the people exulted and sang Te Deum Laudamus.”[18]
Whoever Excommunicates Me Excommunicates God?
A couple of years before the Bonfire, Pope Alexander VI wrote to Savonarola reasonably asking him to stop making prophecies. “You ought rather to have attended in your preachings to union and peace than to preach such things as the vulgar call your prophecies and divinations; you ought also to have considered that the conditions of the times are vehemently opposed to the sort of doctrine which you put forward in public, a doctrine which would be sufficient to create discord even where there is the greatest peace—how much more so where such feuds and factions flourish!”[19]
In May, 1497, a few months after the Bonfire of the Vanities, Pope Alexander VI excommunicated Savonarola. Savonarola then allegedly said, “Whoever excommunicates me excommunicates God.”[20]
Within a year, public opinion turned against Savonarola. Perhaps sensing he was cornered and not willing to slink away into obscurity, Savonarola chose to go out in a blaze of glory by accusing the Pope of heresy and being in league with Satan. In his sermon of February 1498:
The Pope may err, and that in two ways, either because he is erroneously informed, or from malice. As to the latter cause we leave that to the judgment of God, and believe rather that he has been misinformed. In our own case I can prove that he has been falsely persuaded. Therefore any one who obstinately upholds the excommunication and affirms that I ought not to preach these doctrines is fighting against the kingdom of Christ, and supporting the kingdom of Satan, and is himself a heretic, and deserves to be excluded from the Christian community.[21]
Not surprisingly, given the medieval ethos of the time and Savonarola's lack of military power, he must have known that he had little time left on Earth. The Florentines planned their first trial by fire in 400 years for Savonarola, which turned into a fiasco. Fra Domenico da Pescia offered to take Savonarola's place on the pyre. Not to his credit, Savonarola accepted. The event was rained out, the crowd felt cheated, so they pursued and captured Savonarola. He was arrested, tortured, confessed to making up his prophecies, sentenced, and then executed with two of his colleagues. They were hanged and set ablaze. The officials, wanting no part of a cult worshiping Savonarola's relics, swept all the ashes and remnants into the river Arno.
While Savonarola was going up in flames, da Vinci was safely far away finishing The Last Supper in Milan, and Michelangelo was also far away finishing the Pietà in Rome. After Savonarola's death, both da Vinci and Michelangelo came back to Florence where da Vinci began the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo created The David. Had Savonarola lived longer and held on to power, two of humanity's most famous, influential, and evolutionary works would never have existed. The Mona Lisa is believed to be Lisa del Giocondo, a Florentine noblewoman and member of the Gherardini family. And David was locked inside a massive and unique marble block lying in the courtyard of the Opera del Duomo just waiting for Michelangelo to come and set him free.
[1] Richardson, Mary, Laugh a Defiance (1953), G. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, page 180
[2] Kean, Hilda, Some Problems of Constructing and Reconstructing a Suffragette's Life: Mary Richardson, Suffragette, Socialist, and Fascist, Women’s History Review, published online 1998, page 488
[3] Vasari, G., location 29812
[4] De Tolnay, Michelangelo: the Medici Chapel, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1970, page 68
[5] Translated from Girolamo Savonarola, Lettere e Scritti apologetici eds. Ridolfi, Romano, Verde (Rome, 1984), p. 6.
[6] Plato, Grube, G.M.A., 1977, Hackett Publishing Co., Indianapolis, (Plato & Grube, Phaedo, 1977),
page 57
[7] (Gnosticism, n.d.), Wikipedia
[8] (Manichaeism, n.d.), Wikipedia
[9] Leff, Gordon, 1987. Cathari, Encyclopedia of Religion. https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/christianity/christianity-general/cathars
[10] Ibid., Cathari web page.
[11]Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola, Translated and Edited by Anne Borelli and Maria Pastore Passaro, 2006, Yale University Press, page 211
[12] Barlett, K., Florence in the Age of the Medici and Savonarola, 1464-1498, Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, E-book, page 155
[13] Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola, page 246
[14] Ibid., page 12
[15] Ibid., page 256
[16] Ellerbe, H. The Dark Side of Christian History (Windermere, Florida: Morningstar and Lark, 2004), pages 54-57
[17] Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola, page 257
[18] Ibid., page 345
[19] Ibid., page 278
[20] A History of the Church: The Revolt Against the Church: Aquinas to Luther, (1947, 1979, 1993), by Philip Hughes, Vol. 3, p. 493
[21] Sermon (18 February 1498), as translated in History of the Popes (1901) by Ludwig Pastor, as translated by Frederick Ignatius Antobus, Vol. 6, p. 26