In 1497 in Florence a small, ferret faced Dominican friar with a penchant for burning books, and art, and dice, and anything else he and his band of children/informers deemed evil ruled the city. The Bonfire of the Vanities was not started by Savonarola, but he immortalized the act in the huge pyres in the Piazza della Signoria.
Savonarola preached about the corruption of the church and the rich and he prophesied that Florence would become the world centre—the navel, of Christianity. The Florentines expelled the Medici and followed the edicts of the friar and the youth, known as the Weepers, (crying for our sins—Piagnoni—in Italian) he had enlisted to search out the sinful. He began with ‘vice’, same-sex relations, adultery and public drunkenness and then enlisted his young Weepers to find objects for the pyres. Great works of secular art, musical instruments, lavish clothing, jewelry, and objects of art were dragged into the flames. A cultural cleansing in the name of a theocracy with Christ as the King of Florence.
A masterpiece of secular art, The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli would have been dragged onto the pyre by Botticelli himself, if it hadn’t been outside Florence at the Medici country residence Villa di Castello. Botticelli was an ardent follower of Savonarola, but what would convince an artist to set a torch to his own work?
This Botticelli work, painted after his conversion to the ideology of Savonarola appears to return to the gothic. The painting is a step backwards in its figurative scale, the central figures are the largest and the colour is dark and flat. Gone is the powerful graphic language of the human figure let free into space.
I remember seeing Botticelli’s La Primavera and the Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and I had no idea how close these incredible paintings came to being ash. The paintings survived because within a year of the first flames of the bonfire, Savonarola was tried, executed and added to the pyre in the Piazza Della Signoria. So much of human history and culture has died under the feet and boots of conflict, but the artist themselves contributing to this sad legacy, not because of threat but through belief in terrible ideas is tragic.
We are removed by more than 500 years, but where are we today? Our pyre is fueled by algorithms that poke and prod us into incitement instead of engagement. We are building an idiocracy that is all about means and never about ends. The ideological fires we are stoking don’t light our path forward, they blind us to the shared path that got us here.