burning vanities: unmaking and making the world

I raised the Dark Ages in a previous post, and in one before that, in the most general and vernacular sense of separating history into an Age of Reason and all history that came before, by implication several ages of unreason, of superstition, demagoguery and fear. And religious conflict so intense that at the moment the Catholic Church emerged triumphant from its battle with earthly powers it lost the war for the hearts and minds of people in the great reformations, or Renaissance, preceding the European Enlightenment.

The Dark Ages then refer in part to a triumphant universal Church, and its efforts to supplant diversity in human life, especially diversity of thought, with Christian monoculture. In Medieval culture Lent was an important period of prayer, repentance, charity and self-denial leading to Easter, and the death and resurrection of God. In the period before Lent, all rich food and drink had to be discarded, and its consumption in a giant party preceding Lent, and involving the whole community, is considered the origin of carnival.

The Roman festivals of Saturnalia and Bacchanalia may be the precursors of Italian carnival, originating themselves perhaps in the Dionysia and Oriental festivals of ancient Greece. While medieval pageants and festivals assumed a Christian tone, carnival was additionally the celebration of medieval folk culture based on local, pre-Christian, observances.

In Medieval Florence carnival offered opportunities for demonstrations of patrician largesse, and power. The Medici and other patrician families are known to have supported the efforts of lower class Florentines to stage entertainments like mock battles, horse and buffalo racing, re-enactments of history and myth, and other frivolities, together with a bonfire in the Piazza della Signoria on Shrove Tuesday to mark the Florentine carnival's end.

The end of the fifteenth century was an apocalyptic time in Florence. The Medici had fled, and the power of the patricians reduced by, the annexation of Florence by France. A Christian republic was declared, with God as the head of state, and the Dominicans of the Monastery of Saint Mark became the dominant republican faction. The Dominicans also seized control over the Florentine carnival season, re-organising it it exclude all unchristian things. The last Dominican republican Shrove Tuesday bonfire, in 1498, was their greatest achievement of all.

It resembled an octagonal pyramid, ninety feet high, topped with an image of Satan, with stratified firewood representing the seven levels of hell, more devils inhabiting its base. Under Satan artifacts classified by their intensity of sinfulness: paintings on canvas and wood; statues of women by great masters like Donatello; games and amusements of all kinds; musical instruments and scores; ornaments, make-up, mirrors, perfumes; books and manuscripts (amongst them lavish editions of Dante's Inferno); masks, wigs, and carnival ornaments. A vision of hell, of Lucifer and the seven deadly sins enthroned upon a snake, adorned with busts of contemporary and historical Florentine women, the literary works of Petrarch, Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus and Terence, contemporary works of rhetoric and poetry, vanities and distractions of all kind, including those of carnival itself, confiscated in Florence from its residents over the previous twelve months.

Medieval times were diverse beyond imagination. Twelfth century chronicler William of Newburgh, an Augustinian Canon from Yorkshire, England wrote "one would not easily believe that corpses could rise out of their graves to terrify the living, were there not so many cases supported by ample testimony." In the Medieval mind living and dead were in coalition to such an extent that living and dead commingled physically at times. The dead stalked the world of the living, and the living explored the afterlife of the dead. Dante's Inferno lay upon the Bonfire of Vanities not so much for being fiction, but for its perceived inaccuracy compared to Dominican accounts.

The Shrove Tuesday bonfire of 1498 was the greatest of all bonfires of vanities in medieval Florence. The Sunday before, charismatic Dominican Friar Giralamo Savonarola had mounted a pulpit erected in the Piazza San Marco, and, while thousands prayed, invited his enemies, and Pope Alexander VI, to pray to God to strike Savonarola dead right there. A few years previously the charismatic Friar had made a pilgrimage to Heaven itself, from where he returned, after outwitting the Devil with logic, climbing jewel encrusted walls of Paradise to the throne of the Virgin, receiving a crown and the promise of an era of prosperity, and a message from God that

"Whereas Florence has been placed in the centre of Italy, like a heart in the midst of the body, God has chosen to select her, that she might be the centre from which this prophetic announcement should be spread abroad all Italy"

1498 was a year of famine in Florence, which Savonarola blamed on Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, whose name became a byword for corruption. Savonarola preached:

"In these days, prelates and preachers are chained to the earth by the love of earthly things. The care of souls is no longer their concern. They are content with the receipt of revenue. The preachers preach to please princes and to be praised by them. They have done worse. They have not only destroyed the Church of God. They have built up a new Church after their own pattern. Go to Rome and see! In the mansions of the great prelates there is no concern save for poetry and the oratorical art. Go thither and see! Thou shalt find them all with the books of the humanities in their hands and telling one another that they can guide mens’ souls by means of Virgil, Horace and Cicero..."

Pope Alexander condemned Savonarola's sermons, forbade him to preach, and issued an excommunication, proclamations contested by Savonarola's Dominicans in the Roman Curial Courts.

Savonarola offered, like Descartes a century later, ontological proof of a benevolent God who, providing human life with a working mind, would not then let it be deceived. Since the heaven revealed in Savonarola's pilgrimage to it was perfect it followed that his vision of it was also perfect. Contrary visions, especially those arising from human knowledge and reason following from experience of only the natural world, were therefore artifices of the vanity of those who experienced them. For truth was, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge impaired for all time the ability of humans to be perfect, and so it followed that the ideas and knowledge of human beings were inevitably imperfect, and any contrary argument arose from a known imperfection: vanity.

That the dead could rise from their graves to cry out against the living by name and pollute them with all manner of misfortune and disease was common knowledge. Archaeologists find everywhere in Europe remains of medieval dead buried (or perhaps reburied), decapitated, with heads placed between their legs to prevent them from walking amongst the living. The idea that the words and works of the dead reached from their grave to pollute the already imperfect living, appears, by comparison, not so extreme.

Christian visionaries, wandering mendicants, and even prophets, had burned vanities in Florence before. But those had been itinerants arriving at carnival time, who afterward went on their way. Savonarola controlled the city's principal monastery, San Marco, itself recently adorned with the works of Fra Angelico. Savonarola became the spiritual leader of the Christian republic of Florence after the Medici family was exiled. Under his spiritual guidance the city warred upon Florence's former vassal Pisa, whose citizens defeated the Florentines in 1497. War led to shortages, especially of food, and Savonarola, and his vision of Florentine perfection, which had included a glorious victory over the Pisans, lost popular support.

On the Sunday preceding the Shrove Tuesday of 1498 Savonarola stood in the Piazza San Marco, where a large crowd had gathered, waiting for God to strike him dead. Nearby, in the Piazza della Signoria, stood the largest bonfire of vanities Florence's festival season had ever produced, waiting to burn. It had been a year in the making, symbolizing nothing less than the unmaking of the contemporary world, and its remaking in the unpolluted perfection of Christian monoculture.

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