THE LIFE OF GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA (325 pp.)—Roberto Ridolfi, translated by Cecil Grayson—Knopf ($7.50).
From the monastery he had entered a few days before, the youth wrote a letter: "For what do you weep, blind fools, why do you lament . . . ? What can I say of you if you grieve at this, if not that you are my chief enemies, and even the enemies of virtue?" Thus in 1474 did 21-year-old Girolamo Savonarola console his parents, whom he had left without warning and without a word of goodbye, to become a Dominican novice. With the courage and cold zeal of a saintly fanatic, Savonarola continued to rage against virtue's enemies until 1498, when the exasperated city fathers of Florence, urged on by Pope Alexander VI, hanged and burned him in the Piazza della Signoria.
The best, and the worst, that can be said of the tempestuous friar is that he loved God so passionately that he had very little love left for man. Biographer Ridolfi—a Florentine descended from both Lorenzo de' Medici, an early antagonist of the Dominican, and Giovambat-tista Ridolfi, one of the priest's loyal supporters—is clearly an admirer of Savonarola. He feuds pompously with previous biographers, argues expertly and with almost contemporary urgency in defense of the contentious martyr. The reader may reflect that the excesses of body and spirit against which Savonarola thundered were the underside of the same secular Renaissance that produced Michelangelo and Leonardo. It was an age of triumphant humanism, within and without the church, and Savonarola, as Ridolfi relates approvingly, set himself against his era's dominant faith. His well-to-do family had hoped that he would become a physician, but the ills—or the glories—of the body concerned him not at all.
The Hailstorm. In 1482, after eight years of training, the young friar was appointed lecturer to the Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence. The pulpit orator whose thundering was to keep a city in terror, and who seldom spoke to fewer than 15,000 people in his great years, wrote of his beginnings: "I had neither voice, vigour, nor talent for preaching; indeed, my sermons bored everyone."
But in 1484 a mystical revelation reinforced Savonarola's conviction that the church must be reformed. The following year he began the first of his jeremiads on the iniquity of the church, and this time no one was bored. For five years, he developed his somber theme in preaching missions throughout northern Italy. In 1490 he was back in Florence, and the words rang out: "I am the hailstorm that shall break the heads of those who do not take shelter."
Savonarola added withering philippics on the tyranny of Lorenzo the Magnificent to his repertory of complaints against the church. Sensation-hungry Florentines packed in to hear his denunciations, and when friends warned him not to anger the powerful Lorenzo, Savonarola replied grimly: "Though I am here a stranger and he the highest citizen, yet I shall remain and he shall depart." In 1492 Lorenzo was dead. Echoing in the ears of the impressed Florentines was the preacher's reiterated warning: "Ecce gladius Domini super terram, cito et velociter [Behold the sword of the Lord, swift and sure, over the earth]."