The Bonfire of the Vanities
On this day · 7 February 1497
On a single Carnival day in Renaissance Florence, a friar's followers fed art, books and finery to one enormous pyre.
On 7 February 1497, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola staged his most famous purge of worldly excess in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. Bands of children, dressed in white and sent through the city, had gathered up thousands of objects judged to encourage sin. Heaped onto a towering pyre during Carnival, around Shrove Tuesday, they were set alight before a watching crowd.
The flames consumed mirrors, cosmetics, fine clothing, playing cards, dice, musical instruments, secular books and manuscripts, and works of art. Some accounts hold that painters such as Sandro Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi surrendered their own pictures to the fire. Savonarola, who had helped topple the Medici in 1494, framed the spectacle as Florence’s repentance.
The same square that hosted his bonfire would later host his end.
Within little more than a year his fortunes collapsed. Excommunicated and tried for heresy, Savonarola was hanged and burned in that very piazza in May 1498, his moral revolution undone almost as quickly as it had flared.
Sources & references
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