Read The Ugly Renaissance for Free Online Page B

than two centuries, Florence was rent by political divisions and social rivalries, tormented by incessant epidemics, racked by crime, and blighted by social marginalization. And all of this was acted out in the same streets and squares that Salutati, Bruni, and Verino were so desperate to celebrate as the centerpieces of a new and ideal world and through which Michelangelo passed in 1491.
    C ULTURE , R ELIGION , R EVOLUTION : S AN M ARCO
    The location of Michelangelo’s school embodied these contradictions. Large and well-appointed, the convent and church of San Marco werehome to a growing community of Dominican friars and looked every inch the embodiment of the calm and studious piety that Renaissance religious life might be thought to be.
    Like the nearby Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, San Marco was the archetype of the learned cloister.After receiving the massive sum of 36,000 gold florins fromCosimo de’ Medici in 1437, it had been transformed into a sanctuary of art and learning. Adorned with frescoes by the convent’s ownFra Angelico, it had been graced with a magnificent new library designed by Michelozzo, which it had promptly filled with a vast collection of the choicest manuscripts money could buy. Indeed, according to Verino’s De illustratione urbis Florentiae , the library of San Marco contained “so many thousands of volumes written by the Greek and Latin fathers that it could rightly be called the archives of sacred doctrine.” Coupled with the school for artists that Lorenzo de’ Medici had established in the gardens outside, this rich repository of learning conspired to make San Marco one of the centers of Florentine intellectual life. By 1491, it had become a key meeting place for book-loving humanists like Pico della Mirandola andAngelo Poliziano (both of whom were subsequently buried in the church) and for artists hungry to learn from the sculptures in its garden. It was no surprise that Verino thought San Marco the place “where the Muses dwell.”
    The church was, moreover, the site of genuine devotion. Among San Marco’s most treasured possessions and greatest attractions was the Christmas cradle, which has been on display since the fifteenth century and can still be seen today. Consisting of a large number of exquisitely carved figures, it captured the imagination of contemporaries (includingDomenico da Corella) and served as thecenterpiece of the city’s annual Epiphany celebrations. This dramatic event was a magisterial interplay of light and darkness, filled with music, costume, and the scent of incense. By cover of night, friars dressed as Magi and angels led a procession of the city’s most distinguished dignitaries into the church accompanied by burning torches. The carved Christ child was then symbolically brought to the cradle, where it was ritually adored by the “Magi” before being passed around to allow the congregation to kiss its feet. The atmosphere was apparently electric. An anonymous young man who witnessed the procession in 1498 observed that “paradise was in these friaries, and [that] such spirit descended to earth that everyone burned in love.”
    But San Marco was also rapidly becoming a hotbed of religious extremism, political intrigue, and outright violence. In July 1491—that is, at about the time Michelangelo’s nose was broken—FraGirolamoSavonarola was elected prior of the convent. A deeply learned and powerful orator, this gaunt and self-denying man was suffused with a passion for the simplicity of what he perceived to be the true life of Christian piety and was consumed with contempt for the frivolous trappings of wealth. The Advent before his election, he had preached a series of blistering sermons that condemned usury, greed, financial deception, and the celebration of riches but reserved his most bitter scorn for precisely those whose lavishness had made San Marco so important a center of culture—the Medici. He railed against luxury,