The Ugly Renaissance by Alexander Lee Read Free Book Online

“lascivious” paintings, fine clothing, and even the poetry of those who frequented the cloister. Since he studied and worked in the shadow of San Marco, it was perhaps inevitable that Michelangelo should have joined those who crowded to hear Savonarola’s sermons. Although his enthusiasm was not quite as pronounced as that of Botticelli (whobriefly gave up painting under the friar’s influence), he could still recallthe sound of Savonarola’s powerful voice years later.
    It was only narrowly that Michelangelo avoided seeing San Marco’s final transformation into the epicenter of religious revolution. Metamorphosing from moral campaigner into political scourge, Savonarola masterminded the overthrow of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son Piero and orchestrated the establishment of a short-lived but dramatic theocratic oligarchy from the convent. It was also at San Marco that Savonarola fell. While hundreds of worshippers were at prayer on Palm Sunday 1498,an angry mob laid siege to San Marco, demanding the friar’s death. The church’s gates were set on fire while the besiegers surged into the cloisters and scaled the walls accompanied by the frenzied ringing of the bells. Hurling tiles from the roof and brandishing swords and crossbows, the defenders—both friars and laity alike—fought back in a bloody pitched battle that claimed dozens of lives and lasted well into the night. As with Michelangelo’s nose, however, the very violence that characterized San Marco’s experience on that dreadful spring night was a product of precisely the same tendencies that had led it to become such a center of Florentine learning and devotion.
    S TREETS , S QUARES, AND R ITUALS : T HE V IA L ARGA TO THE P IAZZA DEL D UOMO
    The peculiar mixture of elegance and brutality, culture and suffering, becomes more pronounced as we follow Michelangelo’s path deeper into the city.
    Walking down the via Larga, he passed his temporary home at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi. Designed forCosimo de’ Medici by Michelozzo, it had been completed only thirty years before, and its stylishly massive structure was a visible testament to the wealth, power, and cultural clout of the young Michelangelo’s patrons. The street itself was, however, a different matter. Although broad and well proportioned by contemporary standards, the via Larga was unpaved and nothing if not filthy. Even close to the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, the abundance of excrement thrown from windows, or deposited wherever people found a space, would have been hard to ignore. As Michelangelo wrote in a poem years later:
Around my door, I find huge piles of shit
since those who gorge on grapes or take a purge
could find no better place to void their guts in.
    Despite the stink of effluence, the street thronged with people from every stratum of society, and the air buzzed with the sounds of city life. As horses and carts carrying bolts of cloth, barrels of wine, or cargoes of grain rattled noisily along, august merchants and notaries gathered to discuss business or politics in their fine black and red robes, young men in loose doublets and tight-fitting hose stood together gossiping, shopkeepers argued with customers, and priests, monks, and friars walked along with their heads bowed. Holding simple bowls or merely proffering their hands, beggars desperately called for alms, while the sick and the lame pleaded pathetically from the ground.
    At the end of the crowded via Larga, the way opened out into the Piazza del Duomo. Towering above him wasthe dome of Santa Maria del Fiore—the largest construction of its kind since antiquity—and the imposing structure of Giotto’s campanile (bell tower). In front of him stood theBaptistery—erroneously thought to have been founded as aRoman temple in antiquity—complete with the huge bronze doors thatLorenzo Ghiberti had cast for the east entrance. It was Michelangelo himself who saluted the doors as being “worthy of heaven” and thereby