Girolamo Savonarola - Aftermath

Aftermath

Resisting censorship and exile, the friars of San Marco fostered a cult of "the three martyrs" and venerated Savonarola as a saint. " They encouraged women in local convents and surrounding towns to find mystical inspiration in his example, and, by preserving many of his sermons and writings, they helped keep his political as well as his religious ideas alive. The return of the Medici in 1512 ended the Savonarola-inspired republic and intensified pressure against the movement, although both were briefly revived in 1527 when the Medici were once again forced out. In 1530, however, Pope, Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici) with the help of soldiers of the Holy Roman Emperor, restored Medici rule and Florence became an hereditary dukedom. Piagnoni were silenced, hunted, tortured, imprisoned and exiled, and the movement, at least as a political force, came to an end.

Savonarolan religious ideas found a reception elsewhere. In Germany and Switzerland the early Protestant reformers, most notably Martin Luther himself, read some of the friar’s writings and praised him as a martyr and forerunner whose ideas on faith and grace anticipated Luther’s own doctrine of justification by faith alone. In France many of his works were translated and published and Savonarola came to be regarded as a precursor of evangelical, or Huguenot reform. Within the Dominican Order Savonarola was repackaged as an innocuous, purely devotional figure –"the evolving image of a Counter-Reformation saintly prelate"--and in this benevolent and unthreatening guise his memory lived on. Philip Neri, founder of the Oratorians, a Florentine who had been educated by the San Marco Dominicans, also defended Savonarola's memory.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘New Piagnoni’ found inspiration in the friar’s writings and sermons for the Italian national awakening known as the Risorgimento. By emphasizing his political activism over his puritanism and cultural conservatism they restored Savonarola’s voice for radical political change. The venerable Counter Reformation icon ceded to the fiery Renaissance reformer. This somewhat anachronistic image, fortified by much new scholarship, informed the major new biography by Pasquale Villari, who regarded Savonarola’s preaching against Medici despotism as the model for the Italian struggle for liberty and national unification. In Germany, the Catholic theologian and church historian Joseph Schnitzer edited and published contemporary sources which illuminated Savonarola’s career. In 1924 he crowned his vast research with a comprehensive study of Savonarola’s life and times in which he presented the friar as the last best hope of the Catholic Church before the catastrophe of the Protestant Reformation. In the Italian Popular Party founded by Don Luigi Sturzo in 1919, Savonarola was revered as a champion of social justice, and after 1945 he was held up as a model of reformed Catholicism by leaders of the Christian Democratic Party. From this milieu, in 1952, came the third of the major Savonarola biographies, the Vita di Girolamo Savonarola by Roberto Ridolfi. For the next half century Ridolfi was the guardian of the friar’s saintly memory as well as the dean of Savonarola research which he helped grow into a scholarly industry. Today with most of Savonarola’s treatises and sermons and many of the contemporary sources–chronicles, diaries, government documents and literary works–available in critical editions, scholars can provide fresh, better informed assessments of his character and his place in the Renaissance, the Reformation and modern European history. The present-day Church has considered his beatification.