Category Archives: Girolamo Savonarola

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden

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For “Paradise”… means nothing more than a most pleasant garden, abundant with all pleasing and delightful things, of trees, apples, flowers, vivid running waters, song of birds and in effect, all the amenities dreamed of by the heart of man…

Lorenzo de’ Medici

Another garden referenced in Botticelli’s Primavera is Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden which was located on the Via Larga facing the left side of the church of San Marco. The San Marco had an extensive orange orchard to the rear of the church in view of Lorenzo’s garden which may, in this scenario, be recognised as the oranges depicted in the Primavera. The location of the church of San Marco, placed in a corner of the piazza named after it, is another parameter for identifying Lorenzo de’ Medici’s garden in the painting.

Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The church, which also served as a convent, belonged to a community of observant Dominicans, a religious preaching order founded by St Dominic. If one looks to the bottom right corner of the painting, a silhouette of a monk or friar’s cowl is shaped between the legs of Chloris who can also identified as Fioretta Gorini. When rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise, the cowl takes on the appearance of a dog’s head. 

The dog motif became associated with the Order when Dominic’s name was punned as Domini canes, meaning “Hounds of the Lord”. The Order explains the “hounds” relate to the story of Dominic’s mother who, when pregnant, had a vision of a black and white dog carrying a torch in its mouth. Wherever the dog went it set fire to the earth. The dream was understood later when Dominic and his followers, clad in black and white, set fire to the earth with the Gospel message. Observe the hem of Chloris’s smokey, diaphanous dress representing the flame.

This section of the painting is seemingly prophetic in itself for it also serves another interpretation connected to Greek mythology and the “hell-hound” Cerberus that guards the entrance to the underworld. Now the hem takes on the shape of a serpent and its temptation role in the Garden of Eden.

Girolamo Savonarola (right), the Dominican friar who was assigned to Florence in 1490, and who preached and prophesied from the pulpit of San Marco that the “Sword of the Lord” would soon fall on the earth, was himself consumed by fire in 1498 when he was hanged alongside two other Dominican friars. He had confessed to succumbing to temptation and inventing his visions and prophecies. For misleading the people in this way he was excommunicated by the Church as a heretic and schismatic, and sentenced to death by the civil authorities.

So having referenced two markers in the Primavera – the orange orchard and the corner position of San Marco with its Dominican connection – a third indicator which alludes to Lorenzo’s Sculpture Garden is the statuesque appearance of the line of figures.

A fourth indicator is the patterned tunic of Mars, also identified in a previous post as Lorenzo de Medici reaching up to disperse the threatening rain cloud. The pattern represents roots, and with the figure’s feet shown firmly “planted” on the ground, Botticelli has embedded enough clues to confirm that the garden scene was  intended to be recognised as Lorenzo’s Sculpture Garden as well as the those previously mentioned. But there are more which I shall reveal at another time.

The plan below, produced a century after Botticelli painted the Primavera, shows the San Marco and its extended orange orchard. The green areas indicate what remained of Lorenzo’s Sculpture Garden.

Detail from a plan of Florence, dated 1584

Pairing Lorenzo and Sixtus

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Girolamo Savonarola

I recently read a “bite size” biography of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola who preached in Florence during the Renaissance. Sandro Botticelli gets a mention. The co-authors write that Savonarola’s preaching “profoundly influenced” Botticelli “and turned him from painting pornography to producing works that honoured the God of the Bible”.

Perhaps the authors never really understood that Botticelli had profound knowledge of the Bible before Savonarola arrived in Florence when the friar was assigned to the Convent of San Marco in 1482. Botticelli’s Primavera painting exemplifies this and makes several references to biblical passages embedded in what may appear on the surface to some observers as simply a “painting of pornography” based on figures associated with Greco-Roman mythology.

In a previous post I explained that the dual figure of Hermes (Greek) and Mercury (Roman) also represents the Medici brothers Lorenzo and Giuliano, and how some of the iconography pointed to the assassination of Giuliano and the attack on his brother who managed to escape to the safety of the Duomo’s sacristy after sustaining only a slight wound to his neck.

The attack on the Medici brothers was orchestrated by members and supporters of a rival banking family, the Pazzi, with some support of Pope Sixtus IV for their removal from Florence but not their assassination. The whole affair became known as the Pazzi Conspiracy. Eventually, a settlement was reached between Lorenzo and Sixtus IV. 

As part of the diplomacy process Lorenzo arranged for a number of Florentine artists to visit Rome and fresco the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Sandro Botticelli was one of them. References to this commission are found in the Primavera painting, some of which are detailed in previous posts. Not only does Botticelli’s time in Rome provide another link to Lorenzo and Sixtus, it also introduces a painter from an earlier period, Fra Angelico Lippi, to connect to the roles of the father and son painters, Fra Filippo Lippi and Filippino Lippi, depicted in Primavera.

Fra Angelico

Like Savonarola, Fra Angelico (born Guido di Pietro) was a Dominican friar and after leaving the nearby convent of Fiesole in 1436 he moved to Florence and San Marco where he began decorating the newly built convent. In 1447 Fra Angelico was called to Rome by Pope Nicholas V to produce frescoes for the Niccoline Chapel. It is this work that Botticelli has sourced during his own period in Rome in 1480-82 to refer to the relationship between Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pope Sixtus IV, compared to St Lawrence – who Lorenzo was named after – and the martyr’s relationship with a predecessor of Sixtus IV – Pope Sixtus II.

The Medici banking arrangement with the Papal court was complex. There was a hesitancy on the part of Lorenzo de’ Medici to keep financially supporting Pope Sixtus IV and his aggrandizement of the Papal States and his own family. The Pope turned instead to another Florentine banking family, the Pazzi, and this eventually climaxed in what is known as the Pazzi Conspiracy and the assassination of Lorenzo’s younger brother Giuliano de’ Medici.

Lorenzo’s namesake, St Lawrence is one of two martyrs whose lives are portrayed in the Niccoline Chapel in the Vatican. The other is St Stephen. The frescoes were commisioned by Pope Nicholas V and painted by Fra Angelico Lippi. 

According to Wikipedia, “St Lawrence was one of the seven deacons of the city of Rome under Pope Sixtus II who were martyred in the persecution of Christians that the Roman Emperor Valerian ordered in 258”. As Archdeacon of Rome Lawrence was in care of the treasury and riches of the Church and distribution of alms to the poor.

Detail of St Lawrence distributing alms to the poor, painted by Fra Angelico for the Niccoline Chapel

The Emperor Valerian issued an edict that all Christians should be put to death. Pope Sixtus II was the first of the martyrs. Valerian then ordered Lawwrence to hand over all the riches of the Church. Lawrence requested that he be given three days to gather the wealth. In the meantime he began instead to distribute the treasures to the poor and suffering people of Rome declaring that they were the true treasures of the Church. For his defiance he was arrested and while waiting in prison for his execution he baptised fellow prisoners before he died a martyr, roasted to death on a gridiron. 

St Lawrence is usually depicted wearing a dalmatic and holding a gridiron. Fra Angelico portrayed Lawrence in his dalmatic decorated with a pattern of flames to represent the martyr’s death.

The pattern is repeated on Lorenzo’s tunic in the Primavera, except that the flames are inverted to appear as roots, suggesting that “The love of money is the root of all evils’ and there are some who, pursuing it have wandered away from the faith, and so given their souls any number of fatal wounds” (1 Timothy 6:10).

Pope Sixtus II, by Sandro Botticelli, Sistine Chapel

One of the legends asociated with the martyrdom of St Lawrence was the declaration he made while being roasted on the gridiron: “I’m well done of this side, turn me over!” And so another reference why Botticelli’s figure of Lorenzo is shown turned facing away from the Three Graces representing the water of faith through baptism. The biblical reference to wandering souls given any number of fatal wounds can also be be understood in context with the wounds inflicted on Giuliano – twenty – when he was assassinated in Florence Cathedral. Lorenzo escaped with a minor wound to his neck.

A final connection in all of this is the fresco in the Sistine Chapel depicting Pope Sixtus ll, the bishop of Rome who made St Lawrence an Archdeacon of Rome and also martyred by the Emperor Valerian. The fresco was painted by Sandro Botticelli during the time he and other Florentine artists were commissioned to fresco the Sistine Chapel for Pope Sixtus IV.