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BOTTICELLI’S UNFINISHED ADORATION OF THE MAGI, AND THE UNFINISHED MISSION OF KING CHARLES VIII

How the political and religious ferment of late quattrocento Florence is revealed in an unfinished painting by Sandro Botticelli, in which appears King Charles himself

by Andrew Johnson

PROLOGUE

King Charles VIII of France marched his army into Italy in the autumn of 1494, intent on re-establishing French claims to rule the Kingdom of Naples inherited from his Angevin relatives. Benefiting from the support of the shortsighted, too-clever-by-half ruler of Milan, Ludovico Sforza ‘Il Moro’, the neutrality of Venice, a corruption-weakened papacy headed by a new Pope, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), and the dithering of callow young Piero de’ Medici of Florence (inheritor from Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’), all juggling their own diverse interests, the king was in Tuscany by November, practically on the doorstep of Florence.

The Florentines welcomed King Charles as a liberator on November 17, a week after Piero and his family were driven out in a political revolution. The regime change was precipitated by Charles’s invasion and Piero’s bungling of the Florentine response, but was at the same time something of a coup d’état by disaffected elite political insiders which had been brewing for months. Ironically, the Florentines were shocked to learn that Charles demanded Piero de’ Medici be allowed to return, together with other financial, political and military concessions. The city barely avoided a street war and possible sack by the king’s troops, its civic leaders famously threatening Charles that if his trumpets blew the attack, Florence would ring its thunderous civic bell calling citizens to fight in the streets.

Their differences patched up, and Charles anyway convinced he should move on, the king marched south. He entered Rome December 31 and ultimately Naples itself February 22, all with little resistance (barring a few massacres pour encourager les autres). King Charles was welcomed almost everywhere with some combination of jubilation, hope, fear, and acquiescence to his armed force.

At about this time or not long after, I suggest, with these dramatic events still fresh in Florentine minds, the renowned Sandro Botticelli began his final painting of The Adoration of Christ by the Magi, a frequent subject in Florence and one Botticelli had painted several times over the years. He never finished it. Later, anonymous hands retouched and coloured the canvas. Today, cleaned and conserved, it rests usually in the storerooms of the Uffizi

© Andrew Johnson, at RenaissanceInTuscany.com improved version 05/06/2015 [original 17/12/2013]

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gallery, overshadowed by so many masterpieces in the Uffizi’s collections.1 Its curators and art historians appreciate the painting, but few others see it, excepting special exhibitions.

Yet Botticelli’s unfinished Adoration deserves appreciation not only for artistic qualities but also as a remarkably poignant revelation of its times: that is my focus here. Botticelli’s subject, more contemporary than simply the Biblical story of the Magi, and perhaps too the painting’s incompletion, are closely linked to the grandiose, ultimately disappointing Italian mission of King Charles VIII and are entwined with Florentine religion and politics. Charles himself, unremarked so far by art historians, is a principal in the painting, as the “second Charlemagne” and “new Cyrus”, “sent by God”, “sword of the Lord” (gladius domini), “liberator”, agent of a rebirth and universal triumph of the Christian Church -- which never happened.

My aim here is not only to propose and argue a new interpretation of Botticelli’s unfinished Adoration, but to evoke through his painting, in some small way, the human emotions, fervent beliefs, fears, hopes and disappointments of individual Florentines living through those few wonderful, terrible, liberating, controversial, mystical and mystifying years.


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KING CHARLES’s MISSION

Charles VIII’s mission was proclaimed and believed by many -- including Charles himself, it seems -- to be far more than military and dynastic: especially as his phenomenally successful march through sophisticated, wealthy, powerful Italian states seemed explicable only by divine favour. The fervency of those days is essential context for appreciating Botticelli’s painting.2

Charles’s political and dynastic objectives for the Kingdom of Naples were a primary motivation, riding on the military force he was able and willing to bring to bear. He was convinced of his rights; but he prepared the way carefully before finally taking his troops metaphorically across the Rubicon.

Others encouraged and supported him, or opposed him, for their own diverse political and commercial motives. Ludovico Sforza, for instance, thought he could use Charles to strengthen his somewhat dubious control of Milan and expand his influence in Italy. Pope Alexander VI -- the infamous Rodrigo Borgia3 -- feared an incursion by Charles would curb his control of the Church and defeat his ambitions for establishing his illegitimate children atop statelets of their own, whereas for opposite reasons Charles’s intervention was sought by dissident cardinal enemies of the Borgia (led by the future Pope Julius II, Giuliano della Rovere). Powerful noble families in both Rome and the Kingdom of Naples were constantly opposed to each other, and often enough to the pope or the king of Naples as well, ready to seize on a French expedition to serve their own interests and rivalries. Florentines were divided, in part according to their commercial ties to either French or Neapolitan interests.

However, a French Angevin attempt to re-take Naples, allied to dissident barons and brought to the boil in a stew of cross-cutting Italian interests, had been repulsed thirty years earlier. The highly experienced, hard-headed French chancellor and ambassador Philippe de Commynes recorded in his memoirs that “before [King Charles] undertook this enterprise, it was warmly debated whether he should go or not, for by all persons of experience and wisdom [including Commynes himself ] it was looked upon as a very dangerous undertaking”.4

But hard-headed political considerations were closely linked in the minds of many contemporaries with medieval legend and history, often indistinguishable, and with religious yearnings and prophecies.

Charles, his inner clique of advisors, his allies (and propagandists), believed or took advantage of a medieval story featuring the coming of a “second Charlemagne”, another King Charles of France who would march into Italy with divine blessing to restore peace and


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overturn tyrants: as the original Charles the Great -- Charlemagne -- was held to have done 700 years earlier against the Lombards; and as a successor royal Charles, the Angevin brother of King Louis IX, was seen to have done over 200 years earlier as the champion of the pro-papal Guelphs against the pro-emperor Ghibellines (or the local interests who fought each other under those labels). It was this Charles of Anjou who had established the Angevin kingship of Naples and southern Italy that Charles VIII claimed to inherit. And it was this Guelph tradition which was associated by some with the overthrow of local tyrants and protection of local liberties by a longed-for, mythical “good king”.

Young King Charles had already proclaimed his attachment to the Charlemagne legend in 1492 by naming his son and heir Charles-Orland. Orland or Orlando, Roland in English, was an unprecedented name for French royalty but was Charlemagne’s chief paladin, famed in poetry and legend, even supposed to have fought victoriously for the catholic faith in southern Italy. New supposed prophecies were brought to light in France, on the eve of the


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invasion, of a young French prince Charles who would follow in the steps of Charlemagne into Italy to subjugate its princes, to purify the Church of Rome and re-take Greece and Jerusalem for Christianity.5

The myths of Charlemagne had their hopeful believers -- or half-believers -- in Italy too, who wished for a sort of deus ex machina to overturn rulers whom they held to be tyrants, or at least enemies -- in Florence above all (as shall be discussed) but not only there. It was recorded by the Venetian historian Marin Sanudo, for instance, that King Charles wanted to emulate his illustrious ancestors and most especially Charlemagne, and fulfill the“many prophecies” of his own great achievements, of an expedition to Italy and beyond against the Turks for recovery of the Holy land.6 When Charles reached Milan, Ludovico Sforza upped the ante by promising that with his help Charles would become even greater than Charlemagne.7 Sanudo reported, too, how Siena welcomed King Charles with paired statues over the city gate of Charlemagne and Charles himself.8 Taking due advantage, the king had hoped to enter Rome for the Christmas Day anniversary of Charlemagne’s crowning as Holy Roman Emperor; he opportunistically timed his departure south from Rome for ‘Saint’ Charlemagne’s day, January 28.

But longing for a new Charlemagne was not simply a lingering medieval fantasy, it was driven by very present fears. The legend of Charlemagne was reanimated by contemporary anxiety and longing for a new Christian champion to repulse the conquering Turks, who had taken Constantinople in 1453, advanced in eastern Europe, landed in south Italy at Otranto in 1480. Immediate military hope was fed by crusading legends.

King Charles proclaimed from the outset that a crucial purpose of his Italian undertaking was a “sainte expédition” against the Turks, proceeding through the conquest of Naples but going further. His ambassadors to Italy in the summer of 1494 emphasized the “impresa di Santa Terra”, his purpose of a mission to the Holy Land against the Turks, even more than his claims on Naples9, and he re-emphasized in a manifesto from Florence his intention to go on to Jerusalem.10 Title to the Kingdom of Naples involved, by longstanding (although disputable) inheritance, title to the theoretical Kingdom of Jerusalem; so in March 1494 Charles had proclaimed himself King of Sicily [Naples] and Jerusalem11 (and took the precaution in Rome of buying from the last claimant to the throne of Byzantium rights to that title, too12). The pope, addressing Charles in person (and serving his own interests, of course), exhorted him to “imitate Charlemagne and depart against the infidels”13. No doubt with great relief the pope sped Charles on his way so that he could “réaliser son bon projet”, with no mention of the king’s claims on Naples but with with highflown praise of his “très cher fils dans le Christ” who, “enflammé du zèle de la foi catholique”, had launched his “très grande armée ... à une expédition contre les perfides Turcs”.14


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Furthermore, Charles’s proclaimed mission, as scourge of Italian tyrants, as the second Charlemagne, as divinely-destined conqueror of the threatening Turks, was seen by some in the light of God’s supposed plan for the whole of human history. That is, as fulfilling persistent mystical, millenarian and apocalyptic prophecies of a Christian leader, the instrument of God who would appear to scourge the sinning world, reform and renew the Christian Church and its too-worldly clergy, conquer the unbelievers and the Holy land, preparing the way for the second triumphant coming of Christ. Already in June and September 1494, the head of the Camaldolensian order of friars, Pietro Dolfin, had hailed the king as an instrument of divine providence, the minster of God come amongst us.15 From Rome, the Ferrarese ambassador wrote of how everyone anticipated Charles’s arrival “con summa devotione”, as if the millennium were truly at hand: “Ad ognomo pare mille anni, come sel venisse redempturus Israel.”16

Not surprisingly, sincerely or merely as propaganda, Charles proclaimed that his mission was divinely blessed. Standards were emblazoned “Missus a Deo”, sent by God.17 Taking the hint, or sincerely too, Capua and other cities welcomed Charles with crowds chanting “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini”.18 In Siena, again, the triumphal arches erected for Charles’s entry hailed him as “ad idem divino missus numine”, as well as liberator of Italy and the Roman Church.19

More concretely, Charles emphasized and re-emphasized promises to take Naples as the first step toward re-conquering the Holy Land. Somewhat cautiously, he was willing to pose as a Church reformer (encouraged by opponents of Pope Alexander Borgia), so long as it did not involve actually deposing the pope or, especially, side-track his conquest of Naples.20 Marching south, Charles summarized his objectives in a letter home to the clergy of Troyes: “Notre intention n’est pas seulement pour le recouvrement de nostre royaume de Naples, mais est au bien de l’Eglise et recouvrement de la Terre Sainte”.21 In his November manifesto from Florence, widely promoted in Italy and elsewhere, the king insisted above all on his “sainte expédition” against the Turks, “sous la conduite de Dieu”, while defending his claims to Naples and demanding free passage through the papal states with a threat, if opposed, to put his cause “devant l’Eglise universelle et devant les princes de toute la chrétienté”22, implicitly menacing the pope with the old bugbear of a council of the church overruling him, perhaps even replacing him.

So a heady brew of diverse, sky-high expectations, hopes and fears fueled the King’s progress. The Florentine historian Jacopo Nardi, a young man during these years, recorded how everywhere in Italy, and especially in the Roman papal court, “era nato gran travaglio e perturbacione, come se Iddio ovesse eletto questo principe per sua singolare instrumento a causare qualche rilevato effetto nella sua santa Chiesa; tante grande era la espettazione che universalmente pareva che gli uomini avessero conceputo di lui...”: everywhere both anguish


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and high expectations developed around Charles’s mission, as if God himself had chosen this king as His special instrument for the greater good of His Church. 23

And increasingly so, as the king’s remarkably rapid, practically unopposed march through Italy convinced many that only God’s guidance of Charles’s mission could explain his success. The initially skeptical Commynes summarized the contemporary view fairly enough: “all things succeeded for our interest better than we could have expected or hoped, and no wonder, for God’s providence appeared so visibly for our assistance that nobody could deny it... In short, this expedition into Italy was performed with so much ease, and so little resistance, that our soldiers scarce ever put on their armour during the whole expedition... I conclude, therefore, with several pious and religious men, and the general voice of the people (which is the voice of God), that God intended to make an example of these [Italian] princes, that by their chastisement others might be excited to conform their lives to his commandments”.24 And from Florence, the acute and well-informed diarist Piero di Marco Parenti regarded Charles’s occupation of Naples as something marvellous, unprecedented, which many thought must have been guided from heaven: “cosa maravigliosa, e più mai non udita, la quale soto dal Cielo procedessi si reputava”.25


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FLORENCE and KING CHARLES

King Charles’s mission was nowhere welcomed with greater intensity than in Florence; and in Florence his mission’s divine complexion was proclaimed more powerfully than anywhere else by the extraordinary charismatic preacher Girolamo Savonarola.

Yet Florence’s initial welcome of Charles as liberator from Medici tyranny, epitomized by his gaudy entry into the city November 1726, preceded the heights of Savonarola’s influence. The King’s successes in Italy and the dramatic expulsion of the Medici from Florence were causes not consequences of Savonarola’s success. Most of the elements compounded in King Charles's mission were already present in Florence in latently powerful form; they were inflamed by his invasion and irresistible progress.

Guelph traditions and Angevin loyalties were probably stronger in Florence than anywhere else in Italy. Florentine bankers had been essential to Charles of Anjou’s thirteenth century Guelph victory over the Ghibelline successors of Emperor Frederick II in the Kingdom of Naples. The once-powerful Florentine Parte Guelfa, the Guelf Party of political elites, lived on in fifteenth century Florence although more as a “dignified” than an “effective” institution (to borrow Walter Bagehot’s characterization of the later nineteenth century British monarchy). Even so, the Guelph tradition was remembered in connection with (somewhat vaguely defined) Florentine civic liberties. Angevin coats of arms still adorned Florentine buildings, most prominently the giant civic town hall, the Palazzo dei Priori, now Palazzo Vecchio, where they can be seen today.

A long-standing tradition of political alliance with the French monarchy -- at least rhetorically -- was being abandoned by young Piero de’ Medici, controversially in Florence. After all, while economic links with Naples remained important, not least through the grain trade which helped feed Florence, banking and commercial links with France were strong


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and Piero’s posture put them at risk. Amongst the growing opposition to Piero within the Florentine political elite were key figures with close personal and commercial links to France; his own Medici cousins (with prior reasons for alienation from the primary Medici line) were found to be receiving subsidies from the French crown.

Charlemagne legends lived on vividly in Florence, where Charlemagne was reputed -- as recorded by the popular historian Villani, followed by the Venetian Sanudo27 -- to have been Florence’s “second founder”, supposedly having rebuilt the city after barbarian destructions during the long fall of the Roman empire, and confirmed its liberties. Florence’s official historian, the great humanist chancellor Leonardo Bruni, was more nuanced but saw Charlemagne as “restorer” of Florence and practically an ideal king.28 Bruni’s successor Donato Acciaiuoli eulogized Charlemagne in a new biography, a copy of which he had presented personally, on behalf of Florence, to King Charles’s father Louis XI.29 Naturally, Florence’s November accord with Charles VIII hailed him as another Charlemagne.30

Mystical or millenarian ideas were also alive in Florence, as Donald Weinstein’s deservedly admired work has shown:31 “the myth of Florence” disseminated belief in a destiny for Florence both as civic daughter and heir of Rome, and as divinely favoured -- destined -- to play a role in the future triumph of God’s Christian Church: a “new Rome” in both senses.

With Charles’s invasion, these traditions were fertile ground for the king and his allies, and for Florentines fearing or seeking advantage from the French military advance. All the more so with the overthrow and expulsion of “the tyrant” Piero de’ Medici and his immediate family on November 9 -- ironically, after Piero’s bungling led him into an eleventh hour over-reaction and capitulation to Charles’s cause so drastic that he personally, without civic or elite backing or consultation, signed over key Florentine fortresses and promised huge civic subsidies to the French king.

As the king’s powerful army loomed over Florence, Florentines welcomed him as their “liberator and restorer of liberty”32 -- but, realistically, they also feared his troops and perhaps his intentions. The fervent, on-the-edge atmosphere of those days is well expressed in writings of different kinds by very different authors.

In high official humanist style, writing to publicly welcome the king to Florence, the famed philosopher, humanist cleric and Medici client Marsilio Ficino recognized Charles as sent by God, as the legendary and even millenarian “rex pacifius” and as the new Charlemagne of Florentine tradition, while exhorting the king to respect and sustain Florence’s liberty (Ficino’s primary aim, presumably) and, not least, move on to the Holy Land. “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord, Charles”, say the Florentines in Ficino’s script, “our dearly beloved, most high and peace-loving king”; “deliver holy Jerusalem, occupied by the


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most savage barbarians, for the supreme redeemer of the human race. We hope verily that you will deliver the holy kingdom with ease, after having taken possession of the hereditary realm [Naples] as you pass...”; “the exalted Charles appears to have been sent by God to subdue the Turks and to recapture holy Jerusalem from the visible enemies, just as almighty God himself has freed the human race from the invisible fiends” .33

Ficino’s script (delivered or not) might be dismissed as mere Florentine flattery, as might the exuberant pageantry that fulsomely welcomed King Charles; but other writings are very personal.

One, called today the “Ternario” -- “uno ternale [a type of poem] dello illustro re di Francia” -- was an anonymous popular poem, apparently made before Charles’s arrival for oral recitation on street-corners (a common and very well-attended art or verbal craft in fifteenth century Florence34). The Ternario celebrated the the old French alliance and the French king -- When God created man and the world, he created at the same time the French royal crown (sceptro) -- and exhorted King Charles in particular: God sent you to the world (eletto al mondo)....Relieve Tuscany of all its sorrow!35

Another poem was inserted by Piero di Marco Parenti in his private record of events.36 Parenti was an acute diarist and member of the middling elite whose contemporary account is remarkably vivid, complete and well-informed. His little poem celebrates the revolutionary expulsion of the Medici, originally, apparently, exulting on that November 1494 day itself, then with a few key revisions celebrating King Charles’s entry into Florence, to be finalized some time after the king’s departure, perhaps in January 1495. The final version praises Charles as the “good liberator lord” (buon Sire liberatore) sent by God as his intermediary (mediatore) to return liberty to Florence, freeing it from the Medici tyranny; but the version upon the king’s entry goes so far as to characterize Charles as the “Messia liberatore” sent by God, as an almost divine guardian of Florentine liberties. This middle version seems most millenarian and Savonarolan, a position from which Parenti distances himself as his chronicle progresses, with his rapid disappointment in the king, too, but it captures the fervent emotions of the day.

These themes, this fevered atmosphere, seemed to come together in the person and preaching of the extraordinary Dominican friar and fiery preacher Savonarola. For him and for many Florentines King Charles was -- or came to be seen as -- God’s instrument to scourge Italian sins and sinners, to overthrow tyrants, indeed to advance a divine plan for the world.


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SAVONAROLA’s KING CHARLES

Savonarola’s reputation in Florence was already significant and rising before Piero’s expulsion, as a powerful preacher expressing religious exhortations and warnings which, although neither original nor unique, were brilliantly and dramatically proclaimed.37 But his influence soared with Charles’s triumphant advance and especially Piero’s overthrow, even though Savonarola was away from the city on the crucial day of the anti-Medici revolt. (Savonarola had been sent as one of the ambassadors to treat with King Charles before he reached Florence.) His powerful but somewhat vaguely, traditionally expressed exhortations to repent in the face of God’s imminent scourge, of a new Biblical flood, seemed to be coming to pass.

From a preacher, Savonarola became -- and made himself -- a prophet. (As Weinstein’s biography acutely explains.38)

Before Charles’s arrival, at least as early as 1492, Savonarola warned Florentines in broadly apocalyptic terms of a coming scourge sent by God: “Ecce gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter”, his vision of the scourge as sword of the Lord hovering over Florence, Italy and the Church, coming swiftly and soon. Perhaps surprisingly, others such as Dolfin, Parenti, and even Ficino had recognized Charles specifically as God’s instrument well before


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Savonarola publicly took that step. But in his 13 January 1495 sermon, with the triumphant king in Rome poised to march on with papal blessing, Savonarola identified the prophesied sword of the Lord as King Charles’s: “I saw a sword over Italy, and it quivered, and I saw angels coming.... All of a sudden, I saw that sword which quivered above Italy turn its point downward and, with the greatest tempest and scourge, go among them and scourge them all..... [Now] I will explicate it for you. The sword which quivered -- I must say this to you, Florence, is that of the king of France, which is appearing all over Italy...., this scourge which has to come during the renewal of the Church.... I have declared to you: Gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter. Believe me that God’s dagger will strike, and soon.”.39

Moreover, Savonarola claimed to have foretold not only God’s scourge but more precisely the still-recent 1492 death of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the fall of the unrepentant Medici. Although he publicly broadcast his claims only in that same January 13 sermon, after the event, he said he had made the prophecies earlier to friends, and later recounted his admonitions to Charles personally, privately, in Pisa and in Florence, that the king had come as God’s chosen instrument for the good of the Christian Church and should act accordingly. Savonarola was widely believed, even by Commynes, for instance, who met Savonarola but was not part of the Florentine milieu.


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As Piero Parenti recorded in April 1495, Savonarola was tireless in proclaiming from the pulpit that the Church had to be reformed, renewed, with Charles acting as God’s agent: “e che questo re di Francia el ministro di Dio era”.40

But Savonarola was no mere exploiter or amplifier of King Charles’s mission and its propaganda, however much his own mission benefited. He consistently expressed what he believed to be universal themes.

Three major emphases in Savonarola’s preaching especially distinguished his views of King Charles’s mission, I suggest. They are integral to understanding Botticelli’s unfinished Adoration.

First, Savonarola repeatedly emphasized reform of the Church as absolutely fundamental, as a moral imperative. His were not the political or personal motivations of dissident cardinals, nor Charles’s own cautious and tactical endorsement of reform. Savonarola called for root and branch Church reform, renewal, conversion to a purer Christianity believed to have been embodied by the early Church and in conformity with his reading of Biblical messages and the Church Fathers. Moreover, this reform was to be accomplished by the miraculous scourge of God, not by tame institutional changes nor mere words (he did not proclaim any specific program of reform). He exhorted King Charles to fulfill the mandate from God to reform the morally fallen Church: “Dio ti manda a riformare la chiesa che giace prostrata in terra”.41 This was to lead Savonarola increasingly into direct conflict with the Pope, which contributed to the charismatic preacher’s downfall.

For Savonarola, King Charles was less a new Charlemagne than a “new Cyrus”, in his words: a modern Persian King Cyrus who, as God’s instrument, had freed God’s chosen people (then the Jews, now meaning true Christians) from their Babylonian captivity (a longstanding metaphor for a corrupt Church) to return to Jerusalem -- metaphorically for Christians the “New Jerusalem”, the city of God, their true spiritual home -- to rebuild the Temple: that is, the Church as a whole, all its members, as a moral rehabilitation or rebirth.

Second, while Savonarola like many others saw Charles’s mission as moving beyond Naples to the Holy Land, unlike most he proclaimed not military conquest but conversion of the Turks and all unbelievers, of the whole world, as the miraculous outcome. The Church was not only to be wholly reformed but also, he prophesied, to extend everywhere, wholly triumphant. Charles was less a military leader than literally the instrument of God, acting as, finally, the fulfillment of Biblical and subsequent millenarian prophecies as well as Savonarola’s own.


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These two universal elements of Savonarola’s message were practically inextricable in his preaching. For instance, in that sermon of 13 January 1495, the sermon in which he publicly revealed -- claimed -- his prior prophecies of the overthrow of the Medici and first identified Charles specifically as the gladius Domini: “if you are a Christian, you must believe that the Church has to be renewed... But to effect this, there is a need for other men than those the Church has today. Therefore, the Church has to be renewed so that men may become good and go there [the Holy Land] to convert the infidels to Christianity. Go and read the Fathers on that passage in the Gospel of Matthew where [Christ] says Evangelium hoc praedicabitur in toto mundo et tunc erit consumatia: ‘This gospel shall be preached through all the world , and then will come the consummation’ “.42

Savonarola tied these two elements closely to a third: the coming material as well as spiritual triumph of Florence in particular, so long as Florentines listened to him, believed his prophecies, and followed his moral prescriptions. But for Savonarola, Florence’s particular triumph was to play a central part in the universal cause.

In his sermon of 10 December 1494, Savonarola spoke almost crassly, addressing an audience no doubt still joyful with relief after the tense confrontation with French troops: “I announce the good news to the city that Florence will be more glorious, richer, more powerful than it has ever been. First, glorious with regards to God and men: and you, Florence, will be the reformation of all Italy and the renewal will begin here and expand everywhere, for this is the navel of Italy, and it will be your counsels that will reform all through the light and grace that will be given to you by God. Second, Florence, you will have uncounted riches and God will multiply everything for you. Third, you will spread your empire; thus you will have temporal and spiritual power.... But if you don’t do what I have told you, you won’t have it”.43

About ten days later, with the king’s triumphal progress nearing papal Rome, Savonarola expressed his larger vision in an eloquent analogy integrating contemporary events with Biblical exegesis, universal prophecy with promises to his Florentine audience.44 He parsed Florence’s and Italy’s upheavals in terms of God’s creation of the world, thus of a new world being re-created before their very eyes, and a new Florence. “In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram”, he recited to his audience in Florence’s cathedral: In the beginning God created heaven and earth, newly from chaos, which -- he proclaimed -- could fittingly be said of Florence’s own miraculous transformation (mutazione) in one great day from the sixty years darkness, confusion and caos of tyrannical Medici rule to the clear light of a new world.

In a typically down-to-earth Savonarolan touch, earlier in the same sermon Savonarola made use four times of a politically and religiously charged pun: “Conoscerai che [Know that] Dio è venuto per medicare la tua città”, a pun on the Medici family, literally “doctors”, who had


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made Florence sick only to be overthrown by the true doctor, Christ miraculously come to heal the city, so that Florence will reform itself to live in a new and better way (che la città viva ad un altro modo, e che ella faccia nuova reformazione). The initial theme of this sermon was “Audivit Zorobabel...” from the Biblical book of Haggai: the civic leader Zorobabel who listened to the prophet Haggai, “nunzio del Signore” (like Savonarola himself, of course), and who, with the high priest Jeshua, fulfilled God’s will that his people rebuild the great temple of Jerusalem for the return of God’s people, liberated by Cyrus from Babylon -- “Fu condotto da Dio quel popolo a quella reedificazione del tempio”.45 The hint was very clear that King Charles was the “new Cyrus” prophesied by Savonarola, whose coming had liberated Florence not merely politically but had liberated the city also to transform itself morally, metaphorically to rebuild the temple, the true temple made up of reformed Christian souls.

Nevertheless, this transformation, reform, making a new city, must be completed step by step. (“Però, nel volere fare questa reforma e tanta mutazione e quasi fare una nuova città e che ella viva ad un altro modo che non ha fatto per il passato, bisogna anare gradim, cioè di grado in grado...”). Just as God created the world in six days of Creation, so Savonarola prophesied his vision for Florence and the world unfolding over six analogous, figurative days. The first day was Florence’s civic revolution, when God divided light from darkness. The second day, when God created the starry firmament, was at hand that December with Florence about to establish a reformed constitutional regime: “Questa reforma sarà el tuo firmamento...el firmamento della tua libertà”. And so on, step by step, day by day, through the moral reform of Florentines -- “Bisogna che tu, Firenze, diventi bona!”.

Come the climactic sixth day, when God created man in His own image, reform would become universal. Having witnessed the great transformation and re-creation of Florence, all men would give themselves over to devotion, to perfected lives, transforming or re-creating themselves in moral likeness to God (si daranno totalmente all devozione e al perfetto vivere e transformarsi in Dio). The renown and imitation of reformed Florence would spill over all Italy and even unto the Turks, converting all to Christ as better Christians than today, living in simplicity, disdaining material things of this world. Finally, then would arrive the seventh day, when God rested in satisfied peace: “Così saranno poi quieti nella Chiesa renovata, convertendosi gli uomini allo amore delle cose divine e quasi cessando dalle opere del mondo, e sarà allora la Chiesa gloriosa in tutto el mondo...”: Thus shall the reformed Church be at peace, with all men converting themselves to the love of divine things above things of this world: thus shall be consummated the glorious Church of Christ through all the world.

This Savonarolan and contemporary Florentine view of King Charles’s mission and Florence’s, with both intertwined in a miraculous universal cause, is, I argue, revealed in Botticelli’s final, unfinished Adoration of the Magi. To see how, let us look closely at the subject matter of the painting itself.


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BOTTICELLI’s ADORATION of the MAGI

The story is well-known, and the usual elements are there of earlier Botticelli and other Florentine painters’ Adorations of the Magi. Their sources are more the widely known Golden Legend compendium by Jacobus de Voragine than purely Biblical readings. “When Jesus was thirteen days old, the Magi, led by the star, came to him: therefore the day is called Epiphany, ...because then the star... showed the Magi that Christ was the true God... These three, wise men and kings, came with a numerous company to Jerusalem... On the day of Christ’s birth, while they were there, a star came to them... When the Magi departed from Jerusalem, the star went before them until it came and stood above where the child was... Seeing the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy... The Magi...found the child with his mother. They fell to their knees and offered their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Here [St.] Augustine exclaims: ‘... O Infant, great and glorious, ...before whom kings tremble and seekers of wisdom kneel!’... In the same vein [St.] Bernard writes: ‘....Here the wise men give up their wisdom in order to become wise’... And [St.] Jerome ...says ‘Look upon the cradle of Christ and see heaven!’”.46


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Conventionally in paintings, the Magi from the east kneel before and adore the Child held by Mary, flanked by a contemplative Joseph. The holy family are sheltered in a cave or simple stable (or both) -- in Botticelli’s last Adoration by a shed roof alone -- but overshadowed by remains of much larger classical Roman building. Its ruins recall the popular legend that at Christ’s birth the great temple of pagan Eternal Peace shattered47, and more generally that with His birth Christianity replaced an older age with a new era in God’s plan for human history. Conventionally and popularly, the Magi are accompanied by a picturesque crowd of servants, courtiers, grooms with horses, hangers-on, all providing scope for painterly invention, a pleasing diversity and colourful exoticism, and often enough for inserting portraits of the painting’s patron and famous contemporaries as Botticelli himself did for the Medici and others.

Art historians date this Adoration of the Magi to late in Botticelli’s career, roughly 1500, on stylistic grounds.48 Caneva’s 1994 article provides the most recent scientific analysis. It confirmed Botticelli’s original authorship of the Adoration, possibly assisted by his workshop, as usual fifteenth century Florence; and confirmed that probably most of the colouring and some retouching is later, mainly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although it is not possible to say whether some colouring might have reflected Botticelli’s intentions. It is, however, on the painting’s subject matter that I focus, and there is no question of its Botticellian design and drawing.

The most eloquent description of Botticelli’s unfinished Adoration is still Ronald Lightbown’s penetrating regard. Of the painting’s quality, style and meaning, Lightbown writes: “The same disregard of every other effect in favour of impetuous intensity of feeling dominates Botticelli’s last Adoration.... Many of the motifs are still there of the early Adorations, but the old symmetry is discarded in interest of pressing, gesturing, crowding movements, all filled with the eagerness of ardent devotion, toward the Holy Family, which is placed to the left of center, a position that accentuates the straining and yearning motions of the other figures. The old picturesque motifs, the variety of courtiers, the restless horses and their grooms are now merely conventional accessories. The setting of huge picturesque rocks is one of the most artificial even of Botticelli’s settings: like other features of [Botticelli’s] late panels, it recalls his earliest works and suggests how intensely and exclusively his imagination was now concentrated on the passionate expressiveness of his figures”.49 Along similar lines, Cecchi sees this Adoration as a reconsideration by Botticelli of traditional forms and typologies in a moving, emotional and Savonarolan key (“in chiave patetica e savonaroliana”), constituting almost a “summa” of Adorations painted throughout his career, “una sorta di testamento artistico”.50

Indeed, yes. Yet it seems to me that at least two important features of this last Adoration are quite new and call for more attention.


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First, the Magi themselves are practically indistinguishable. Traditionally, even universally, the Magi were three (often representing the three ages of every man: youth, maturity and old age, and sometimes representing the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa). They were depicted as royalty, crowned or putting aside their crowns in reverence, and offering their costly gifts. But no crowns nor gifts are to be seen here. It is even difficult, almost impossible, to discern which three are the Magi: one sure magus, he in a blue cloak, is kneeling closest to the Christ child and kissing his foot; perhaps two others are slightly closer to the child but really four or five richly dressed men are kneeling similarly grouped before Christ, yet another on the right is halfway down to his knees, removing his hat and bowing, and two more thrust forward on the left and right of the holy family, both with arms crossed in reverence. They are nearly enveloped by the crowd pressing forward, almost an expression of the crowd more than any three are distinguishable as Magi. Why? Is this only a matter of Botticelli’s personal stylistic evolution?


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Second, there is one figure distinguished from all the rest: but not one of the Magi. He stands prominently in the right foreground, regarding Christ over and across the kneeling adorers, alone wearing distinctively modern, richly fashionable aristocratic dress. He is further marked out by holding a prominent sword. He stands still where others are “pressing, gesturing, crowding..., all filled with the eagerness of ardent devotion, ... straining and yearning”, excepting only the Holy Family themselves: more alone yet among the crowd than even they are.

This distinctive figure, I propose, is recognizable as King Charles VIII. (As far as I know, this has not previously been suggested.51 )

Recognizable first from his visage, compared to other contemporary representations of King Charles: 52 the large, aquiline nose (frequently noted by observers), straight shoulder-length hair, unimposing figure (albeit this representation flatters him). As recorded by Bartolomeo Masi, for instance: “El ... re era piccolo di persona, brutto di viso, le spalle grosse, el naso aquilino ...”. 53The likeness is evident, it seems to me, from a small gallery of contemporary portraits.


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Also from certain aspects of his dress, as recalled by Florentine observers of the king. Contemporaries may well have seen his short coat, hose (men’s tights) and soft boots as “in the French style”, a deliberate echo of the rich vesti all franzese (Cerretani) which all record as having been worn to flatter by the elite Florentine youths deputed to lead the French into the city. It is noticeable, too, that in the painting the one riderless horse, from which the Charles figure nearby seems to have dismounted, is attended by the only two other figures wearing modern men’s short cloaks over hose. Cerretani recalls Charles wearing similar clothes to those in the painting (without putting undue reliance on its colours which may or may not reflect Botticelli’s intentions): “l’abito suo era una vesta di veluto nero a mezza gahmbba (a thigh-length mantle) le chalze (hose) veluto nero scharppe et pantufole di veluto...”


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One telling detail is Charles’s hat recorded specifically by Parenti as “un cappelletto bianco in testa, con certe penne nere in esso, vergate d’oro”: “his head covered by a gold-bordered white cap decorated with black feathers”.54 Looking closely at Botticelli’s painting, Charles can be seen to be wearing just such a small whitish or beige cap (cappelletto) with a black feather jutting up from the front.

But King Charles is additionally, surely, identified by his salient sword. Although the king was recorded influentially by Guicciardini (writing in the 1530s) as entering Florence aggressively “armed, lance on thigh”, it seems equally or more likely that he carried a meaningful sword.55 Cerretani (a witness, writing later about 1512-1514) specifically records how King Charles, entering the city, stood out on horseback in the midst of his armed guard, wearing armour and holding a bare sword in his hand, with (again) his white cap (“una spada gnuda in mano e ‘l capello biancho”). The official French chronicler who accompanied Charles, André de La Vigne, celebrated how “In great triumph and grand majesty, ... the king of kings entered Florence, where he gained a glorious renown, For he bore the avenging sword (Car il portoit le glaive furieux)”.56 Alternatively, citing a French account, Labonde-Mailfert records the king as being processionally preceded in Naples by a high officer carrying “l’épée de justice du roi” and in Florence “l’épée royale”.57

But, above all, Savonarola identified his prophesied, visionary “sword over Italy” as King Charles’s sword: the gladius domini, sword of the Lord, of this “new Cyrus” come to liberate God’s chosen people, free them to rebuild the Temple, their Church, and precipitate the universal conversion to true Christian faith prophesied for Savonarola’s coming “sixth day”. No wonder the sword stands out prominently in Botticelli’s painting.

Once this identification of Charles VIII is made, other features of Botticelli’s Adoration become more explicable, convey meaning comprehensively.


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BOTTICELLI’s ADORATION: SAVONAROLA’s PROPHECY and KING CHARLES’s MISSION

Viewed in historical context, Botticelli’s last Adoration expresses the Savonarolan view of King Charles’s universal mission, during those fervent, exhilarating, fearful, hopeful, terrible few years before his and Savonarola’s missions failed.

The Magi are almost an expression of the crowd more than they are distinguishable as rulers, on purpose. Lacking crowns and even rich gifts, they are wise men, not the traditional kings. (The Golden Legend notes this interpretation in passing, even if it rarely prevailed.) Almost enveloped by the pressing crowd, the wise men express the universal conversion prophesied, exhorted, by Savonarola, their reverence emblematic of the devotion of the whole crowd -- whose fervency is remarked by virtually every description of the painting -- as all press forward to adore the newborn Christ child, the true king of all in Savonarolan terms, needing no crown.58

The crowd is not made up of courtiers, servants and exotics, but of more or less similarly dressed converts to Christ’s universal Church, in long cloaks of dignified colours, predominantly black and red interspersed with some blue. Whether or not the colours are all as Botticelli might have intended, it seems no coincidence that strong blue dress links Charles with the one sure and foremost magus, as well as with Mary (in her usual blue robe) who traditionally symbolized the whole Church. Hats differ above all, the main echo of traditional exoticism, but they may be intended deliberately to evoke the whole world’s conversion, including the conversion of Moslem Turks (two or three foreground figures on the left are turbaned) and Jews: I suggest that one of the kneeling group of wise men, in black on the right, may be wearing a Jewish prayer shawl over his shoulders. (Denis cites Jews of the time for whom “De France vint la salut”, from Charles’s France comes salvation.59)

Perhaps the wise men, leaders of the crowd pressing forward, are even meant to be republican leaders in the Florentine republican mould, or of the Savonarolan Florentine mould, rather than princes. After all, Savonarola promised Florence that she would be the centre and leader of the universal conversion and reform of the Church. The January 6 feast of the Adoration of the Magi is properly the Epiphany, the first recognition of Christ’s divinity, and was celebrated together with another Epiphany on the same day, the Baptism of Christ by John the Baptist: Florence’s supreme civic patron saint. Moreover, Epiphany was held to be the anniversary of Charles the Angevin’s assumption of the throne of Naples60, with resonance for traditionally Guelph Florence -- and for republican, Savonarolan Florence’s French alliance with Charles VIII.


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The feast of Epiphany was a traditionally grand Florentine occasion marked under the Medici by a procession in which they personally donned the robes of Magi kings. Anti-Medici and Savonarolan Florence put a stop to that, but in 1498 the ceremony was revived in Savonarola’s monastery of San Marco with the Signoria’s approval. As Weinstein recounts, “the members of the Signoria came to the high altar of the Church with their traditional offering of candles to kiss Savonarola’s hand....” Three chief friars, among them Savonarola himself, processed “costumed as the Magi in silk chasubles decorated with gold and jewels”, enacting the Magi’s search and finding of the Christ child. “The Magi presented the Holy Infant to be adored by the friars ranged along the walls of the lower and upper church. First they held forth the babe’s feet to be kissed... ‘Paradise was in those convents’, rhapsodized Pseudo-Burlamacchi, who as a young friar may have been one of the celebrants. ‘The Holy Spirit descended to the earth and everyone burned with love, so that they were able to say, “Blessed are the people who know jubilation”’.61

There is, just conceivably, a delicious little irony in the Adoration’s foremost magus kissing the Christ child’s foot: not a new motif but particularly clear here. The expressive gesture epitomizes the wise men’s adoration, echoing the Epiphany adoration by Florence and the San Marco friars on Florence’s behalf, but it is also recognizably analogous to the traditional ritual obeisance of kissing the reigning pope’s foot. But here, perhaps, meant to emphasize Christ as the true king, the true head of the Church, especially compared to the Borgia pope heading an earthly church in desperate need of reform, according to Savonarola. At the same time, however, with no irony at all the chief magus might be seen as mirroring the taking of communion, of the sacred eucharist which was and is, for believers, literally the body of Christ.

It seems to me possible, in all this context, that Botticelli intended alert contemporaries to perceive in the painting’s undifferentiated wise men Florence’s own Signoria, leading the popolo, citizenry of Florence, to -- or back to -- Christ re-born, as it were, in a re-born Florence. The foremost magus, he in blue, is singled out as first among them by positioning closest to the Christ child, kissing His foot, and also by a unique armband: representing, perhaps, the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia leader of the Signoria and chief executive (roughly speaking) of Florence. His fellow wise men can be read as numbering eight, evoking the eight Priors of the Signoria: emerging from the crowd, as the Priors and Gonfaloniere were selected by lot from the eligible citizenry, bracketed on left and right by magus figures thrusting forward to bow down with their fellows.62

Savonarola preached to the Signoria more than once, memorably praising especially the Signoria in office for the momentous two months of November-December 1494, who presided over the “first days” of Florence’s miraculous re-creation, analogous to God’s creation of a new world, a new heaven and a new earth and a new firmament. Addressing


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them and their successors in the Signoria, he said: “You, who have completed your duties and have carried out in your own time this new reform, you have done well, a thing pleasing to God, and have gained a great crown in heaven, because you have labored for the honor of God and for the well-being of your city ... In this, you have assimilated yourselves to God, Who rules the entire universe, since you have organized the government of your city... This work ... has been accomplished by the will of God, and it has been the work of God more than of men... But you also can join in the work of God and be glad to assist in it. God wants you to pursue this work with fervor and charity.... Christ is your King, and may you be His ministers.”63 That is, here in Botticelli’s Adoration, His nine wise men.

Botticelli’s portrayal of King Charles might also have evoked for contemporaries Donatello’s famed bronze statue of David, psalmist, prophet and king, made for the Medici and displayed in the entrance cortile of their palazzo but appropriated by the renewed republic after Piero’s ouster and moved to the entrance cortile of the centre of Florentine public life, the great civic Palazzo della Signoria. Although Botticelli’s Charles does not precisely mirror Donatello’s David, his stance and the position of his sword seem to me strikingly similar. (The reference might have been reinforced by David originally bearing a plume or feather in its hat, as seems almost certain.) David was a well-established symbol of republican Florence and civic virtue, combining the city’s civic and religious ideals. The Medicean base for Donatello’s David already bore the Latin inscription “The victor is whoever defends the fatherland [patriam]. All powerful God crushes the angry enemy. Behold, a boy overcame the great tyrant. Conquer, O citizens!”.64 Moving the statue to its new civic setting spoke eloquently and with deliberate irony to Florence’s liberation from the Medici yoke as a divinely favoured heroic accomplishment analogous to David’s conquest of Goliath, and associated Donatello’s David with the Signoria. Moreover, at just this period (about 1496-97), King Charles was identified with David by a Franciscan friar, Johannes Angelus

Terzone (though not a Florentine), who praised Charles as the new David “with whose sword God shall strike down all tyrants”, who was called to undertake a new crusade against the Turks, “The lord of hosts, the fighter for Christ, the king sent by God, the Davidian, the Israelite”.65


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Taking these considerations all together, this identification of King Charles is more firmly grounded than the suggestion (originally by Heath Wilson in 188066) that two partially hidden figures in the crowd, to the left of Joseph just outside the circle of wise men, are identifiable as Savonarola himself (with a monkish cowl) exhorting and pointing out the Christ child to none other than Lorenzo de’ Medici ‘the Magnificent’, who had died in 1492. This is not historically impossible, since a story was current that Savonarola had exhorted Lorenzo on his deathbed to “restore the liberty of Florence and declined to bless him when he refused”. (Weinstein dismisses this as a fiction “that seems to have originated in the overactive imagination of fra Silvestro Maruffi”, but since Maruffi died with Savonarola presumably the story was known beforehand.) 67 Savonarola himself claimed in his Compendium of Revelations, of August 1495, not only that he had prophesied the death of Lorenzo and the Florentine revolution, but also that his theme of “the sword of the Lord” -- Gladius domini, cito et velociter -- had come to him immediately after his visit to the dying Lorenzo (although in fact there is little or no evidence that Savonarola was anti-Medici before the November 1494 revolution). He preached that theme first on the very day of Lorenzo’s death, 8 April 1492 (exactly seven years before Savonarola’s own downfall).68 Still, while Lorenzo’s visage seems recognizable in the Adoration, the putative Savonarola is not quite so recognizable and seems oddly to be wearing a brown Franciscan cowl instead of his black Dominican. In fact, Caneva recalled and approved Ridolfi’s refutation of Wilson’s suggestion, seeing any resemblance as vague and more than likely due to later retouching of some of the painting’s details, though others are non-commital.69

What is incontestable is how the painting is dominated by the innumerable enveloping crowd, their fervent adoration, their arriving in haste, gesticulating, pressing forward. Their “impetuous intensity of feeling” serves a purpose, I suggest, in addition to its conformity with Botticelli’s late painterly style. Savonarola repeatedly preached for just this fervency, the “eagerness of ardent devotion” in Lightbown’s words describing this painting. Indeed Savonarola castigated the merely “lukewarm” or “tepid” in their religious belief, he even portrayed them as his and Christ’s enemies. Here, I suggest, in Botticelli’s last Adoration we see an almost limitless, innumerable crowd of passionate believers, converts rushing to subscribe to Savonarola’s vision -- similar, yes, to earlier Adorations, but this is a much larger crowd emptying the countryside and cities in the background, exhibiting more “passionate expressiveness” than ever: developments of stylistic degree which convey here a new quality of Savonarolan meaning.

Even the powerful rocks are expressively craggy, rough-hewn, ominously over-balanced. The usual classical remains emerge barely hewn from the living rocks. Perhaps this is meant to draw attention to the crowd as the “living stones” making up the Church, in the


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common language of religious symbolism: “the spiritual temple” (in the words of the Golden Legend). “We are that temple, i.e. the congregation of all the faithful, built up of living stones, I Pet. 2:5: ‘Like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house’.”70 And, as in the authoritative writings of Bishop Durand of Mende, “This is the Lord’s house, firmly built, whose foundation is Christ, the cornerstone”.71 In Botticelli’s painting, is this “spiritual temple” emerging from the living rocks, building upon the Christ child cornerstone?72

The universal spiritual Church is also, for believers, the mystic body of Christ himself. In the sermon he preached to the outgoing Signoria and their successors, Savonarola exhorted: “Stand with Christ, Florence, and do not search for another leader”, while explaining that “Christ is not to be considered solely in Himself, with regard to His own person, but also mystically in relation to His members, and so ... pray, you who are His members, and God will give the nations as an inheritance to Christ, His Son; that is the infidels will be converted, and they will come to the faith of Christ, and His Church will be renewed.”73 Botticelli’s Adoration reflects this sentiment, this belief.

At the vortex of all this movement, anxiety, fervency, is a calm, simplified stillness to which the crowd arrives or will arrive: the Holy Family. And, on his own, King Charles VIII, “sent by God” in the words of Charles’s own (propagandistic) banners, whose naked sword is Savonarola’s “sword of the Lord”. If there is a “Savonarolan style” in the art of his time, perhaps this is it: “passionate expressiveness of his figures”, “in chiave patetica e savonaroliana”, yes, fervency not “tepid” belief; but combined and balanced with a central simplicity, the simplicity of belief and confidence of salvation achieved, supposedly recalling early Christianity, which Savonarola also preached.

The whole seems to me to evoke well the character and meaning of many of Savonarola’s sermons and prophecies, notably of late 1494 and early 1495, that period of Charles’s triumph and Florence’s revolution. Here in Botticelli’s last Adoration, I suggest, we see not only another celebration of the literal birth of Christ, the first Epiphany of the three Magi kings, but also we see proclaimed metaphorically Botticelli’s representation of the civic and moral transformation of the liberated city of Florence to a glorious, eternally blessed city of God -- “se tu Firenze farai la volontà di Dio, sarai più gloriosa che mai e sarai la città di Dio, el quale è benedetto in saecula saeculorum”,74 as he concluded his sermon on re-creation; and, even more, a representation of the prophesied re-birth and reform of the Church of Christ. Savonarola’s closest Dominican follower, Domenico da Pescia, writing in a Bible in 1491, had made note of a prophecy that Christ would be re-born in Florence.75 As Savonarola preached on Christmas Day 1494, Nativity, “just as I told you of the great glory that God will grant to this city, so will he grant you fullness and abundance of spirit. Lo, the spirit of the Lord over the earth fully and abundantly. And the man born there, Christ, will be born in the hearts of many. The Lord will found his Church with his spirit”.76


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Moreover, Savonarola spoke of the prophesied conversion of the Turks to follow renewal of the Church as their “baptism”, as all Christians are baptized and as was Jesus himself by John the Baptist on Epiphany day.77 And he preached his landmark sermon proclaiming King Charles as wielder of the sword of the Lord on the culminating octave or liturgical eighth day of the celebration of Epiphany: when he also proclaimed that “the Church has to be renewed so that men may become good and go there [the Holy Land] to convert the infidels to Christianity. ... This Gospel shall be preached through all the world, and then will come the consummation”.78

Another Epiphany is painted here, then, but this time of the whole world, the dramatic universal conversion of nations, Savonarola’s sixth day of re-creation, culminating in the seventh-day central image of the glorious universal Church at peace -- la Chiesa rinnovata, reborn, la Chiesa gloriosa in tutto el mondo: Thus, he said, shall the reformed Church be at peace, with all men converting themselves to the love of divine things above things of this world: thus shall be consummated the glorious Church of Christ through all the world.

The successful, supreme consummation, that is, of King Charles’s mission and Savonarola’s: the re-creation and reform of Florence and the world which Savonarola had declared in December 1494 would unfold within two years.79


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UNFINISHED MISSIONS, UNFINISHED PAINTING

It did not turn out that way, of course. Which (to speculate) may explain why Botticelli’s Adoration is unfinished.

Politically and militarily, the King’s unexpectedly complete and rapid successes stimulated a growing, countervailing opposition from states who had stood by or been his allies during the march south. The League of Venice or Holy League, proclaimed March 31, 1495, finally united the pope, Milan and Venice with King Ferdinand of Aragon and Emperor Maximilian, against their common enemy-of-the-day. King Charles retreated from Naples in May 1495, never having fulfilled his supposed mission to the Holy Land, or tried. He barely escaped military disaster at Fornovo in July, on his way back to France. He died in April, 1498, never having returned.

Perhaps it was inevitable that King Charles’s mission in practice could not live up for long to all the high expectations, fostered by Charles himself and by others sincerely enough or for their own motives. But Charles himself and his troops increasingly disappointed and alienated Italian rulers and peoples.

Commynes admitted frankly in his memoirs that “At our first entrance into Italy we were regarded like saints, and everybody thought us people of the greatest goodness and sincerity in the world; but that opinion lasted not long, for our own disorders, and the false reports of our enemies, quickly convinced them of the contrary... As to our ravishing of the women they wronged us; but for the rest, there was too much truth in what they said.”80 Moreover, in retrospect at least, “the designs against the Turk, of which our king had talked much at his first entrance into Italy, declaring he undertook that enterprise for no other end but to be nearer and more ready to invade him” were “an evil invention, a mere fraud”.81

As Commynes recorded the Venetians’ views expressed directly to him as Charles’s ambassador, “they could not suffer that my master should amuse all Europe with his fair words, as he had done, saying that he wanted nothing but the kingdom of Naples, and would next turn his arms against the Turk; and that then he should falsify his word, act quite contrary, possess himself of what he could in the territories both of the Florentines and the Pope, and endeavour to destroy the Duke of Milan”.82

In Florence, disillusionment with King Charles came relatively quickly for some, with Charles’s demands to re-admit the despised Piero de’ Medici and, even more, his failure to return Pisa to Florentine rule as he had promised. Shortly after Charles left Florence, Parenti recorded his disgust with the French troops’ comportment along their march, and with Charles’s unfaithfulness to his promises, especially to the city of Florence; good will


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had turned to hatred, now everyone saw that Charles had come not to retake the Holy Land but to despoil Italy (vedendo ciascuno che costui non per acquistare Terrasanta, ma pe depopulare Italia venuto era).83 Botticelli’s brother Simone, a convinced Savonarolan, recorded his disillusionment upon Charles’s retreat from Naples.84

Yet Savonarola’s faith in his own prophecies quickly revived, or never faltered. Savonarola scolded Charles for his failure to fulfill the divine mission at first go, exhorted him to return, promised Florentines again that God’s agent King Charles, “il principe di Dio”, would be back soon.85 The consistently pro-French party in Florence even out-lasted Savonarola; contrary to almost all Italian states, Florence hewed to that old alliance. Some other Italians remained pro-French, too, and sustained a faith in Charles’s divine mission, especially in 1496 when rumours and messages from France had the king’s return imminent.86

For his part, Charles always insisted he would return to Italy and fulfill his mission or missions. He never renounced his ambitions to recover the Kingdom of Naples; and he maintained -- or claimed -- his intention to lead another “sainte expédition” to defeat the Turks and recover the Holy Land for Christianity.

All that came to a sudden end in April 1498. Still a young man, King Charles died unexpectedly on 7 April (from carelessly slamming his head against a low stone doorway). Remarkably, and remarked as an omen at the time when news of the king’s death arrived in Florence87, Savonarola’s downfall was precipitated that very same day by the fiasco of an unconsummated trial by fire in Florence’s main Piazza, which was supposed to have shown God’s support for his supposed prophet, or for his opponents. Had God’s will brought down simultaneously His prophet and His sword? The next day an agitated, disillusioned populace (or a large part of them) stormed Savonarola’s monastery of San Marco. Savonarola was captured and arrested; the civic leader of the Savonarolans, Francesco Valori, was assassinated while under arrest among the crowd that night. After an inquest (and torture) by the Florentine Signoria, Savonarola was ultimately executed for heresy with his two closest followers on 23 May 1498.

April 1498, I suggest, is a likely terminus ante quo for Botticelli’s last Adoration, at least for the impetus to finish it. It seems unlikely -- although not impossible -- that even a faithful or newly convinced Savonarolan would have wanted to feature afterward the dead and (among Florentines) morally discredited King Charles. So I suggest the painting can probably be dated from its meanings and from the presence of King Charles with his sword to between late 1494 and spring 1498, slightly earlier than estimates based on style alone.

The motivation behind the painting was not necessarily Botticelli’s personal waxing or waning belief in Savonarola’s prophecies and King Charles’s mission. During these years


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Botticelli is documented as working for Savonarolans such as Filippo di Francesco del Pugliese and Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, and for opponents of Savonarola such as Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici ‘Popolani’. Botticelli’s brother Simone records how one of Savonarola’s arch-enemies, Doffo Spini, frequented Botticelli’s workshop on familiar terms in 1499: so familiar, according to Simone (a Savonarolan himself ), as to confess to Botticelli that Savonarola had not been guilty of the sins for which he had been hanged.88 The one work of Botticelli’s that is indisputably and personally Savonarolan, the signed and dated Mystic Nativity of early 1501, follows that surprising revelation, and both come later than the period which, I argue, inspired the unfinished Adoration.

It is, I suppose, conceivable that Botticelli was motivated by a personal conversion, of a sort, to Savonarolan ideals even after the great preacher’s execution, and recalled the great Savonarolan moment in this Adoration. But Botticelli was more than capable of interpreting and proclaiming in his art the motivations and beliefs of an unknown (to us) Savonarolan patron who could have commissioned the panel, and could have abandoned the commission upon the shocks of April, 1498 (even upon the patron’s death, were the commission to have come from Francesco Valori himself ). Or possibly earlier, once those heady days of late 1494 and early 1495 had passed and as grubby realities came to contradict Savonarola’s prophecies and King Charles’s mission. Botticelli was more than capable, too, of expressing in his art the conflicting emotions of his turbulent times and his fellow Florentines. He could have retained the unfinished Adoration in his workshop for potential re-use for another patron or, perhaps, out of lingering personal regard for Savonarola, whose power over men’s memories was recalled by such brilliant un-Savonarolan thinkers as Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

Whatever the circumstances of its original commission, begun in hope, carried out with commitment, intellect and skill, abandoned in disappointment (and perhaps a commission withdrawn), Botticelli’s unfinished Adoration reveals both King Charles’s and Savonarola’s disillusioning, unfinished missions.


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ILLUSTRATIONS and CREDITS:

Sandro Botticelli’s unfinished Adoration of the Magi, Uffizi Gallery (in storage), Florence: page 2 and page 18 in full; details on pages 1, 19 and 24. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

King Charles VIII at prayer, sponsored by Charlemagne:page 4 in full; details on page 7 and page 21. From the Book of Hours of King Charles VIII of France, in the National Library of Spain. Image from the Biblioteca Digital Hispanica.

Arms of King Charles VIII, of the Kingdoms of France and Jerusalem:page 7. From the Book of Hours of King Charles VIII: detail of page 4.

Coats of arms on the Palazzo della Signoria (Palazzo Vecchio), Florence:page 8. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Fra Girolamo Savonarola, ca. 1498:page 10. In the Museo di San Marco, Florence. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Savonarola preaching, a woodcut from Savonarola’s Compendium of Revelations, 1496:page 11. Image from www.3pipe.net .

Savonarolan medal inscribed Gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter:page 12. Image from the Web Gallery of Art.

Adoration of the Magi, Sandro Botticelli ca. 1478-1482, National Gallery, Washington:page 16. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Portraits of King Charles VIII:page 20;• by Jean Perreal, from Biblioteque National de France. Image from Wikimedia Commons.• from Chateau de Chantilly. Image from Wikimedia Commons.• bust of Charles VIII. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Charles VIII at prayer, from the Book of Hours of King Charles VIII: page 21. Detail of page 4.

Mock-up of Donatello’s David in the cortile of the Palazzo Medici, Florence:page 24. Still image from Assassin’s Creed II. From www.3pipe.net .


31

http://www.3pipe.net




Savonarolan medal:page 27. Image by I,Sailko from Wikimedia Commons.

Execution of Savonarola, 1498:page 30. In the Museo di San Marco, Florence. Image from Wikimedia Commons.


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REFERENCES:

Abulafia: David Abulafia (ed), The French Descent into Renaissance Italy 1494-95: Antecedents and Effects (Variorum, 1995).

Borsook: Eve Borsook, “Decor in Florence for the Entry of Charles VIII of France”, in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 10. Bd., H. 2 (December 1961), pp. 106-122.

Boschi: Massimo Boschi, “Adorazione dei Magi” [entry on Botticelli’s unfinished Adoration] in Il Rinascimento a Firenze: capolavori e protagonisti, catalogue of the exhibition in Beijing 6 July 2012- 30 April 2013 (Gangemi, 2012)

Bruni: Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, Volume I: Books I-IV, ed. and trans. by James Hankins (I Tatti, Harvard, 2001).

Caneva 1990: Caterina Caneva, Botticelli: catalogo completo dei dipinti (Cantini, 1990)

Caneva 1994: Caterina Caneva, “Ultime indagini sulla tarda Adorazione dei Magi di Botticelli agli Uffizi”, in Elizabeth Cropper (ed.), Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent: papers from a colloquium held at the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1992 (Nuova Alfa, 1994), pp. 265-276

Cecchi: Alessandro Cecchi, Botticelli (Motta, 2005)

Cerretani: Bartolomeo Cerretani, Storia Fiorentina, a cura di Giuliana Berti (Olschki, 1994).

Commynes: Philippe de Commynes, The Memoirs of Philip de Commines, ed. and trans. by Andrew R. Scobie, Volume II (Bohn, 1856).

Denis: Anne Denis, Charles VIII et les Italiens: Histoire et Mythe (Droz, 1979).

Durand: William Durand, The Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand of Mende: A New Translation of the Prologue and Book One, trans. by Timothy M. Thibodeau (Columbia, 2007)


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Filipepi: Simone Filipepi, “Estrato della cronaca di Simone Filipepi novamente scoperto nell’ Archivio Vaticano”, in P. Villari, E. Casanova, Scelta di prediche e scritti di fra Girolamo Savonarola con nuovi documenti intorn all sua vita (Sansoni, 1898), pp. 453-518.

Fletcher Shaw: Stella Fletcher and Christine Shaw (eds), The World of Savonarola: Italian élites and perceptions of crisis (Ashgate, 2000).

Golden Legend: Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. by William Granger Ryan, Volume I and Volume II (Princeton, 1993).

Horne: Herbert Percy Horne, Alessandro Filipepi commonly called Sandro Botticelli, painter of Florence (Bell, 1908; also reprinted Princeton 1980)

Kent: Dale V. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Ouevre (Yale, 2000).

Labonde-Mailfert: Yvonne Labonde-Mailfert, Charles VIII: Le vouloir et la destiné (Fayard, 1986).

Landucci: Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516 by Lucca Landucci continued by an Anonymous Writer till 1542 with Notes by Iodocco del Badia, trans. by Alice de Rosen Jervis (Books for Libraries, 1927, reprinted 1971).

Lightbown 1978: R. W. Lightbown, Botticelli, Volume II: The Complete Catalogue (Eleck, 1978)

Lightbown 1989: R. W. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work (Abbeville, 1989).

Martines: Lauro Martines, Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Italy (Pimlico, 2007).

Masi: Bartolomeo Masi, Ricordanze di Bartolomeo Masi, calderaio fiorentino, dal 1478 al 1526, a cura di G.O. Corazzini (Samsoni, 1906).

Mai Visti: Memorie di paesaggi: capolavori dai depositi degli Uffizi: “i mai visti”, IV (Giunti, 2004), entry on Botticelli’s unfinished Adoration (anon.), p.28.

Nardi: Iacopo Nardi, Istorie della città di Firenze, per cura di Agenore Gelli (le Monnier, 1858).

Parenti: Piero di Marco Parenti, Storia Fiorentina, a cura di Andrea Matucci (Olschki, 1994).


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Plaisance 1980: Michel Plaisance, “L’invenzione della croce de Lorenzo de’ Medici (1463-1503) et le mythe du second Charlemagne”, in Culture et Religion en Espagne et en Italie aux XV° et XVI° (Publié avec le concours du centre national de la Recherche scientifique, Paillart, 1980).

Plaisance 2008: Michel Plaisance, Florence in the Time of the Medici: Public Celebrations, Politics, and Literature in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, trans. and ed. by Nicole Carew-Reid (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008).

Pope-Hennessy: John Pope-Hennessy, Donatello Sculptor (Abbeville, 1993)

Rinuccini: Ricordi storici di Filippo di Cino Rinuccini al 1282 al 1460 colla continuazione di Alamanno e Neri suoi figli fino al 1506, per cura di G. Aiazzi (Firenze, 1840).

Sanudo: Marin Sanudo, La spedizione di Carlo VIII in Italia, a cura di Rinaldo Fulin (Visentini, 1873).

Savonarola Aggeo: Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa il reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, a cura di Luigi Firpo (Belardetti, 1965).

Savonarola Salmi: Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra i Salmi, a cura di Vincenzo Romano, volume I (Belardetti, 1969).

Savonarola Selected Writings: Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola: religion and Politics, 1490-1498, trans. and ed. by Anne Borelli and Maria Pastore Passaro (Yale, 2006).

Scheller: Robert W. Scheller, “Imperial Themes in Art and Literature of the Early French Renaissance: The Period of Charles VIII”, in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Volume 12, No. 1 (1981-1982), pp. 5-69.

Weinstein 1970: Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970).

Weinstein 2011: Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (Yale, 2011).

Zollner: Frank Zollner, Sandro Botticelli (Prestel, 2005).


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ENDNOTES:


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1 The painting’s condition and its cleaning and conservation by the Uffizi are explained by Caterina Caneva (1994). Prior to that study, Caneva also prepared Botticelli: catalago completo dei dipinti (1990). Brief entries on this Adoration are in catalogues of recent exhibitions including the painting: see Mai Visiti (2004: for an exhibition at the Uffizi) and Boschi (2012: for an exhibition in China). Thorough studies of Botticelli’s career and works are Lightbown (1978 and 1989), Cecchi (2005), and Zollner (2005); of them, Lightbown considers this Adoration most thoroughly -- although without benefit of the subsequent technical examination by Caneva (1994) -- and both Cecchi and Zollner (writing after Caneva) cite Lightbown in support of their descriptions of the Adoration. I am grateful to Daniela Parenti, Direttrice del Dipartimento pittura del Medioevo e primo Rinascimento della Galleria degli Uffizi, for references to Caneva (1994) as well as to the 2004-2005 and 2012-2013 exhibitions. And I invite all those who care about the marvellous art preserved and displayed for us all in the Uffizi Gallery to join the Amici degli Uffizi/Friends of the Uffizi: www.amicidegliuffizi.it .

2 The main secondary sources which I have mined with gratitude include: Weinstein 2011 and Weinstein 1970; Martines; Borsook; Denis; Abulafia; Labonde-Mailfert. And of course Lightbown, together with Caneva, Cecchi, Zollner.

3 Rodrigo Borgia is still infamous, in my view, despite revisionist attempts to rehabilitate him as just one among others similarly corrupt, merely vilified more than most. He was certainly intelligent and capable, a loving father, as well as unscrupulous, nepotistic to a higher degree than ever before, and hypocritical. Labonde-Mailfert (247-248) notes how it became known in November 1494 that the Borgia pope had even sent a secret messenger to the Turks seeking their assistance against King Charles, while at the same time publicly asserting his support for the king to campaign against the same Turks.

4 Commynes: 93

5 On French prophesies, Plaisance 1980: 43 et seq, notably 52-56; and Denis: 65.

6 Sanudo: xxix-xxx and xxxviii

7 Commynes: 130

8 See Sanudo: 144-145; cited in Denis: 22

9 Parenti: 73; Sanudo: xxix.

10 Denis: 65.

11 Labonde-Mailfert: 198 and Abulafia: 50.

12 Denis: 65 fn. 217.

13 According to Sigismondo de’ Conti, cited by Denis: 63.

14 Quoted in Labonde-Mailfert: 282.

http://www.amicidegliuffizi.it

http://www.amicidegliuffizi.it


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15 Denis: 62: “coelesti adactus impulsu”; “minsiter Dei iustitiae est venturus veniat et non tardet”.

16 Cited in Denis: 57

17 Labonde-Mailfert: 214; also Sanudo cited in Denis: 50.

18 Cited in Denis: 50, citing Sanudo.

19 See Sanudo: 144-145; cited by Denis: 22 and Borsook: 114.

20 E.g. citations in Labonde-Mailfert: 222, 262-270.

21 Labonde-Mailfert: 270.

22 Labonde-Mailfert: 248-249.

23 Nardi: 20-21.

24 Commynes: 148, 153-154.

25 Parenti: 183.

26 Borsook: passim.

27 Sanudo: 131.

28 Bruni I: 91-97

29 Scheller: 12-14

30 Borsook: 114

31 Weinstein 1970: passim but especially Chapter I.

32 Borsook, especially: 111.

33 Scheller: 5-8, 34; Labonde-Mailfert: 238; Denis: 64-65. Ficino’s text is entitled “Oratio ad Carolum Magnum Gallorum regem”.

34 Kent: 47-50. Now also see Blake Wilson, “Dominion of the ear: Singing the Vernacular in Piazza San Martino”, in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance Fall 2013, Vol. 16, No. 1/2: 289-309.

35 See Denis:19, 23, 56-57.

36 Parenti: XXI-XXVII (“Introduzione” by the editor, Andrea Matucci).

37 As Weinstein, especially, has explored in both his books.

38 Weinstein 2011.

39 Translation from Savonarola Selected Writings: 69-75 (Sermon of 13 January 1495).

40 Parenti: 204


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41 I owe this quote to Denis: 56, fn. 159.

42 From Savonarola Selected Writings: 73 (Sermon of 13 January 1495).

43 As quoted by Weinstein 2011: 122. Savonarola Aggeo: 166-167 (Prediche X, 10 dicembre).

44 Savonarola Aggeo: 301-321, especially 313-320 (Prediche XVIII). The sermon is dated by its editors to December 19 or 20, 1494.

45 Savonarola Aggeo: 301, 303, 305 (Prediche XVIII, 19 or 20 December 1494); for the medicare/Medici pun see 303, 306, 308, 309. The medicare pun was continued in a minor key by emphasizing that the great “mutazione” had been made by God “sanza lesione”, without wounding or cutting the patient (313).

46 Golden Legend, vol. I: 78-83.

47 Golden Legend, vol. I: 38-39.

48 Caneva 1994 (p. 268) summarizes a consensus on stylistic grounds for “late Botticelli”, citing Lightbown’s (1978) dating of 1496-1504 and others (including her own 1990 catalogue raisonné) tending to propose 1500 to 1505. Nicoletta Pons in her Botticelli: catalogo completo (Rizzoli, 1989) dated the painting to 1500?; Lightbown (1989) to circa 1500-1505; Zollner (2005) to circa 1500-1505?; Cecchi (2005) implicitly accepted the consensus for late Botticelli. The Uffizi’s 2004 Mai Visti dates the Adoration simply as circa 1500.

49 Lightbown 1989: 279

50 Cecchi: 360.

51 Prior to the first version of this article posted in December 2013 on www.renaissanceintuscany.com .

52 Descriptions cited here are from Cerretani: 212 and 214, Parenti: 133. I have also checked for descriptions in account of other chroniclers (Masi, Nardi, Sanudo, Landucci, Rinuccini), and referred to the accounts in Weinstein, Martines, Borsook, Denis.

53 Masi: 26

54 Translation from Martines: 45.

55 Among modern historians, Weinstein 2011 writes of Charles entering Florence “in full armour,...lance on hip” (115); Martines says “lance on hip and bare sword in hand” (44-45); Borsook, citing Villari, “he rode in on a white horse, an unsheathed sword resting upon his thigh in the manner of a conqueror” (108). I owe the Guicciardini quotation to Abulafia: 271

56 Scheller: 36

57 Labonde-Mailfert: 321 and 240; she too identifies the royal sword as “la ‘glaive’ de la vision de Savonarole”.


39

58 In addition to Lightbown’s evocation of the crowd, see for instance Boschi: “Lungo le strade si vede una gran moltitudine di uomini che al seguito dei Magi accorrono ad adorare Gesù. Tipici dell’ultima attività del pittore sono anche i volti e gli atteggiamenti di questa concitata e strabordante folla, che presenta una una vasta e variegata casistica di emozione umane” -- this overwhelming throng, exhibiting a vast and varied register of human emotion.

59 Denis: 58,

60 Labonde-Mailfert: 255

61 Weinstein 2011: 247-248.

62 “By lot” only in theory before the November revolution, since the Medici and their closest allies controlled the selection in reality: but that theory was still powerful in republican symbolism, and the November Signoria overthrew their own Medici selectors.

63 Savonarola Selected Writings: 173-174. Savonarola Aggeo: Prediche XXIII (28 dicembre, 1494).

64 Pope-Hennessy: 155; 147-156. And on the Florentine context and history of David, Kent: 283-286.

65 Scheller: 57-58.

66 Cited in Lightbown 1978, vol. II: 112.

67 Weinstein 2011: 89

68 Weinstein 2011: 89-90, 169.

69 Caneva 1994, p. 267.

70 Golden Legend vol. II: 393-394

71 Durand: 14.

72 Caneva’s stylistic analysis (1994, p. 274) sees the rocks as Leonardesque, but I don’t think Leonardo’s influence is required to explain them. Lightbown’s stylistic analysis (1989, p. 279), by contrast, sees “the setting of huge picturesque rocks” as recalling, along with other features, Botticelli’s “earliest works and suggests how intensely and exclusively his imagination was now concentrated on … passionate expressiveness…” Cecchi sees such features as a reconsideration of Botticelli’s traditional forms and typologies in a Savonarolan key (Cecchi p. 360).

73 Savonarola Selected Writings: 172. Savonarola Aggeo: Prediche XXIII (28 dicembre, 1494).

74 Savonarola Aggeo: 321 (Prediche XVIII, 19/20 dicembre 1494).

75 Weinstein 2011: 336, fn. 35, citing Rab Hatfield.

76 Weinstein 2011: 131 and fn. 35.

77 Savonarola Selected Writings: 153-154. Savonarola Aggeo: Prediche XI (12 dicembre, 1494).

78 Savonarola Selected Writings: 73 (Sermon of 13 January 1495)


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79 Savonarola Aggeo: 319 (Predicha XVIII, 19/20 dicembre 1494)

80 Commynes:133-134

81 Commynes: 249-250

82 Scheller: 52-53 ; Commynes: 180; Denis: 65-66 (and others) cite the hermit Angelo of Vallombrosa who wrote to the rulers of both Florence and Venice in 1496 supporting Charles as the agent of God sent to deliver the Holy Land from the Turks, and exhorting them to ally with France, even though the same Angelo attacked Savonarola for disobedience to the pope.

83 Parenti:155, in December 1494.

84 Denis: 148

85 Weinstein 2011:163, 244, 278

86 For instance, see Amnon Linder, “An Unpublshed ‘pronosticatio’ on the Return of Charles VIII to Italy” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1947 (vol. 47), pp. 200-203. The ‘pronosticatio’ was written by a Franciscan friar in Northern Italy between autumn 1496 and spring 1498. Linder summarizes the thesis as “Charles VIII is the God-sent Reformer and Deliverer, destined to restore Italy to its rightful position, spiritually as well as politically” (p. 200, fn #4).

87 Landucci: 138-139; Nardi: 127; Scheller: 52-53

88 Filipepi: 507-508.

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