Quotes About Savonarola

In Florence the sublime and terrible go hand in hand: Savonarola's Bonfires of the Vanities and Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and Niccolò Macchiavelli's The Prince, Dante's Inferno and Boccaccio's Decameron.

I was born in the Golden West, reared in the arms of the Church, deluged with saints to draw from, and suckled on Italian art: my slates were covered from end to end with portraits of Savonarola, Fra Angelico, and Wild Bill and Sitting Bull; I knew all equally well and admired them about alike.

Young Niccolò had been bred to read the classics and believe in the ideal of civic humanism, even though that ideal was contradicted everywhere he looked.26 Then came 1492 and Savonarola. The republic had been reborn; it even managed to survive the disgrace and death of its would-be messiah.