Florentine Portrait From Weinstein's "Savonarola", I

Getting a realistic picture of Florence in the age of Italian Renaissance is difficult as the subject has been treated for centuries with layers of nearly hagiographic features. Despite numerous revolutions, assassinations, more than a few wars, and much internal conflict among families and between classes, the city's reputation still retains a glow of freshness, virtue and even sanctity. In Donald Weinstein's modern, clear-eyed account of that city's famous Friar Savonarola the environment feels much more inhabited, even seething, and very uncertain.

"A fifteenth century traveler entered Florence through one of its massive gates, made his way through noisy, malodorous streets walled in by multistoried houses with overhanging roofs and teeming with people of every class and calling: gentlemen in doublet and hose, silk-gowned ladies with retinues of servants and exotic slaves, long-robed, sandaled clerics, grimy laborers, beggars, hawkers, cutpurses, flesh peddlers, and gangs of rowdy youths. Passing shops, street corner tabernacles, churches, and formal residential doorways, he soon entered the city's monumental center. In just twenty or thirty minutes the visitor would have retraced in the city's dense fabric more than two centuries of history, from medieval provincial town to proud Renaissance capital of near-mythic fame."

But, Weinstein cautions us, that myth was 'consciously cultivated'. It was contemporaries that called it a new Athens, and the 'Daughter of Rome'. Adorned were the churches, palazzi and public buildings. The many building projects of several decades and centuries had brought variety and beauty to so many parts.

"Graceful spires and towers, white and green marble church facades, beige-toned palaces with graceful loggias, all presided over by Brunelleschi's brick-red, white ribbed cathedral dome - largest in Christendom - tipped with Verrocchio's golden orb." [p. 42]

The proud self image was also found on public inscriptions, in its beautiful church frescoes, even in written tracts sold on street corners. Florence was always taking the opportunity to proclaim how victorious they would be, how close to God she was and how rich. The city and its people had been busy.

"Cheap woolen cloth made up the bulk of its early industrial production, but by the thirteenth century Florence was also exporting fine woolens, silks, leather, paper, soap, glass, and objects crafted from wrought iron, gold, and silver. Florentine merchants were establishing trading networks throughout Italy, the Mediterranean, France and northern Europe. With their accumulated capital they doubled as bankers, branching out into exchange and lending operations in domestic and foreign financial markets. By the end of the thirteenth century they had become the principal money men of the papacy and had a near monopoly as collectors of church revenues as far afield as England." [p. 43]

These incomes would help attract the greatest artists of the day, like Giotto, in order to craft and erect the iconic Campanile. There was also the Palazzo Vecchio just down the street which was also redone in the fourteenth century. Since those high times, the decades of plague tore apart the economic ties within and outside the city. Wages, prices, the accessibility of labor or goods, or the payment of debts continued to violently fluctuate and hang irresolvably. For centuries the tight bond between Florentine bankers and the many needs of Rome, were maintained. There were heated interruptions, now and then, but in a time of such scarcity, the money from Florence had become very important. [p.49]
______________________________________________
quotes and pagination in Donald Weinstein: Savonarola: the rise and fall of a renaissance prophet , Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011