Count Pico della Mirandola, about ten years younger than Savonarola, had spent some time in the court of Lorenzo de'Medici in Florence. A favorite there he had angered Pope Innocent VIII and fled to France in the previous decade. After entreaties from Lorenzo (and his minions spread out all over Italy), it was at last decided and Rome had allowed for Pico to return to Florence under the protection of the court of il Magnifico. This young man, still a young man in his twenties (born the same year as Caterina Sforza), was acquainted with all the ruling families in northern Italy, had studied at Bologna and Padua and Ferrara, and excelled in ancient languages. He learned Greek and Latin at a young age and later, at Padua studies in Hebrew and Arabic increased his view. He sought a reconciliation between schools of Platonic and Aristotlian thought. Along the way he had developed a few theories of humanism, including a kind of syncretism that noticed paralells in different religious precepts and tracts.
Even so, Pico and Giro had apparently become acquainted as well, and in the late 1480's, Pico had been petitioning his patron in Florence, Lorenzo de'Medici, for the same Girolamo to be able to return. Letters from Lorenzo Magnifico were sent to the the Dominican convent General in Florence asking for this Friar Savonarola to be able to return from Ferrara, or Bologna, where he taught. The friars there had to then petition the Vicar of the Lombard Congregation to release him, and this all took some time. Time and money and missives and motion.
Upon arrival, Girolamo would have to readjust to life in Florence with its manners and mores, its methods and means, as well as the brothers at the Dominican convent. Lauro Martines assures us he did well, and soon came to prominence with a number of sermons he wrote over the winter of 1490-1, after his arrival. Martines says these impressed a great number of laymen.
"... [T]he eighteen Advent sermons turned into a hard-hitting assault on a lax and unprepared clergy, on the sins of usury and fraudulent financial transactions, on the avarice of the rich who corrupt their sons by setting immoral examples, on honouring rich men simply because they are rich, on those who are 'tepid' in their religious commitments, and on the buying of Masses for family chapels." [p. 23]Martines uses this to show how contrary to 'standard practice' Savonarola already was behaving.
"Influential families looked to the Church as a source of jobs and income for their sons. When young men took holy orders, they went through a charade, unless they were driven by a spiritual need, and this had given way to job-seeking. A well-placed priest could expect a comfortable life. For two centuries, moreover, the rich had turned to the buying of private space in the wide public areas of churches. There they built frescoed chapels blazoned with their coats of arms, and paid the local clergy for the celebration of private Masses -- ritual prayer for the eternal salvation of the donors or of dead ancestors." [pp. 23-4]Savonarola warned that the future would be full of plagues and scourges and many necessary cleansings. A few rich Florentines came to talk to him and warn him from such foretellings and ask for a more traditional form of preaching. This Friar would not be deterred. His next fifty sermons written in early 1491 for the following season of Lent targeted 'social and economic abuses'. An entire renewal of the Church was needed, not more false forms of penitence. Also, a new form of preaching, of which he was the beginning, was due. Here is where Savonarola made his fame.
________________________________________
notes and pagination from Martines, Lauro: Fire In The City: Savonarola and the struggle for the soul of Renaissance Florence ; Oxford University Press, New York 2006
