The Preacher Who Burned Art And Then Burned Himself

In February 1497, a Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola stood in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence and watched the most famous act of cultural destruction in Renaissance Europe.

He had ordered it.

Thousands of objects — paintings, sculptures, cosmetics, mirrors, wigs, playing cards, musical instruments, manuscripts, love poetry, fine clothes — were stacked into an enormous pyramid in the public square and set alight. Botticelli, enthralled by Savonarola’s preaching, is said to have thrown some of his own paintings onto the fire. Irreplaceable works of art turned to ash while the crowd sang hymns.

Savonarola called it a cleansing. History calls it the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Fourteen months later, in the same square, in front of the same city, Savonarola was the one burning.

THE HORROR Savonarola dominated Florence for about four years — a thunderous preacher who helped drive out the Medici, made sodomy punishable by death, banned gambling and fancy dress, and tried to turn one of Europe’s great artistic centres into a moralised theocracy.

He sent gangs of children dressed in white — his bandi dei fanciulli, “children’s bands” — through the streets to confiscate luxury items and denounce sinners. Florence was to be made holy by being made afraid.

Then the Pope came for him.

Alexander VI — the Borgia pope, whom Savonarola had attacked relentlessly from the pulpit — excommunicated him and demanded his arrest. Political tides shifted. A crowd that had once cheered him stormed his convent. The friar they had treated as a prophet was dragged out, beaten and handed over.

He was tortured. They used the strappado: his hands tied behind his back, a rope looped over a beam, his body hoisted and then dropped so the weight dislocated his shoulders and tore his joints. There were multiple drops. Under agony, he confessed. Then he tried to retract. They hoisted him again. More drops. More broken bone and torn tissue.

A papal commissioner arrived from Rome with the condemnation already written. He had not seen the full evidence. He had not watched the interrogations. He stepped into Florence and reportedly said: “We shall have a fine bonfire, for I have the sentence of condemnation with me.”

The verdict was luggage.

On 23rd May 1498, Savonarola and two close followers were led to the Piazza della Signoria on a scaffold built at the same place as the Bonfire of the Vanities. They were stripped of their Dominican robes and dressed in thin white shirts. The crowd — many of the same Florentines who had once burned their own possessions at his command — jeered and shouted.

All three friars were hanged from the same frame. The executioner is said to have tried to prolong Savonarola’s strangling, timing the rope so the fire lit beneath them would reach his flesh while he was still alive. He misjudged it. Savonarola died of hanging before the flames reached him.

Then the heat did something no one expected. As the fire enveloped his body, the tendons in his right arm shrank and tightened. The arm lifted. Slowly, involuntarily, the dead friar’s hand rose from his side in what looked like the gesture of blessing.

For a moment, the burning corpse of the man who had ruled Florence seemed to raise his hand and bless the people who were watching him burn. Some onlookers burst into tears. Children and youths danced around the pyre, singing, and threw stones at the bodies in the flames.

When the fire had done its work, what remained of the three friars was gathered up and thrown into the River Arno. No relics were to survive, no bones to become objects of devotion. The water carried away the ashes of the man who had once told Florence what was holy.

THE MODERN RELIC Today, a small bronze plaque is set into the paving of the Piazza della Signoria, marking the spot where Savonarola and his companions were executed. It sits almost unnoticed among the stones, close to the Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia dei Lanzi. Tourists walk over it while photographing statues and architecture. Some stop and leave flowers.

The same square that held the Bonfire of the Vanities held Savonarola’s pyre. The same space heard hymns sung as paintings burned, and then heard jeers as the man who ordered the burning was hanged and incinerated.

The plaque is round, modest, easy to miss. It says nothing about Botticelli’s canvases becoming smoke, nothing about children throwing stones at burning bodies, nothing about a dead hand rising in the heat that looked, for an instant, like a blessing.

The stones remember both fires. The metal disc remembers only that someone burned here.

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