Another distinguished member of the Florentine Academy, Angelo Poliziano, was also one of Savonarola’s converts. We find him exchanging confidences with Pico, both declaring that love and not knowledge is the faculty by which we learn to know God: “ ‘But now behold, my well-beloved Angelo,’ writes Pico, ‘what madness holdeth us. Love God (while we be in this body) we rather may, than either know Him, or by speech utter Him. In loving Him also we more profit ourselves; we labour less and serve Him more. And yet had we rather always by knowledge never find that thing we seek, than by love possess that thing which also without love were in vain found.’ ”(115) Poliziano, like Pico, had at one time some thoughts of joining the Dominican Order. He too was buried at his own request in the cowl of the Dominican monk in the Convent of San Marco. Lorenzo de Medici, who during his life had made many attempts to win the support of Savonarola, and had always been repulsed, could not die without entreating the great preacher to visit him on his deathbed and grant him absolution. Italian Humanism was for the moment won over to Christianity by the Prior of San Marco. Had the poets and the scholars, the politicians and the ecclesiastics, the State and the Church, not been so hopelessly corrupt, there might have been a great renovation of mankind, under the leadership of men who had no desire to break the political unity of the mediæval Church. For it can scarcely be too strongly insisted that Savonarola was no Reformation leader in the more limited sense of the phrase. The movement he headed has much more affinity with the crude revival of religion in Germany in the end of the fifteenth century, than with the Reformation itself; and the aim of the reorganisation of the Tuscan congregation of the Dominicans under Savonarola has an almost exact parallel in the creation of the congregation of the Augustinian Eremites under Andreas Proles and Johann Staupitz. The whole Italian movement, as might be expected, was conducted by men of greater intelligence and refinement. It had therefore less sympathy than the German with pilgrimages, relics, the niceties of ceremonial worship, and the cult of the vulgarly miraculous; but it was not the less mediæval on these accounts. It was the death rather than the life and lifework of Savonarola that was destined to have direct effect on the Reformation soon to come beyond the Alps; for his martyrdom was a crowning evidence of the impossibility of reforming the Church of the Middle Ages apart from the shock of a great convulsion. “Luther himself,” says Professor Villari, “could scarcely have been so successful in inaugurating his Reform, had not the sacrifice of Savonarola given a final proof that it was hopeless to hope in the purification of Rome.”(116) § 2. John Colet.