
By Paul Strathern
ISBN-10: 160598826X
ISBN-13: 9781605988269
One of many defining moments in Western heritage, the bloody and dramatic tale of the conflict for the soul of Renaissance Florence.
By the tip of the 15th century, Florence was once good tested because the domestic of the Renaissance. As beneficiant consumers to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the revolutionary humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo de' Medici (Lorenzo the superb) they possessed a diplomat able to guarding the militarily susceptible urban in a weather of continually moving allegiances among the foremost Italian powers.
However, within the kind of Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo came across his nemesis. jam-packed with outdated testomony fury and prophecies of doom, Savonarola's sermons reverberated between a disenfranchised inhabitants, who most well-liked medieval Biblical certainties to the philosophical interrogations and intoxicating floor glitter of the Renaissance. Savonarola's objective used to be to set up a 'City of God' for his fans, a brand new form of democratic nation, the likes of which the area had by no means noticeable sooner than. The conflict among those males will be a struggle to the demise, a sequence of sensational events—invasions, trials by means of hearth, the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', negative executions and mysterious deaths—featuring a solid of an important and charismatic Renaissance figures.
Was this an easy conflict of wills among a benign ruler and spiritual enthusiast? among secular pluralism and repressive extremism? In an exhilaratingly wealthy and deeply researched tale, Paul Strathern finds the paradoxes, self-doubts, and political compromises that made the conflict for the soul of the Renaissance urban essentially the most complicated and significant moments in Western historical past.