Other circumstances conspired to render this interval of anarchy pernicious to art, till the return of the Medici in 1512. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, the Dominican Frà Girolamo Savonarola, of enthusiastic memory, by prophecies and sermons, loaded with democratic principles, gained gradually such an ascendancy over the minds of the people, that the Signoria found themselves forced to adopt a senate at large; in other words, to submit to a democracy. But Savonarola, not content with political victory, aimed at a total revolution in morals, and continued to lash the profligacy of public manners, overflowing in voluptuous song and music, or gazing at the lascivious nudities of statues and pictures, as irresistible incentives to vice. It had been customary during carnival, to erect certain cabins in the market-place, to set them on fire on the eve of Ash-Wednesday, and bid them farewell amid the shouts of convivial mirth and the frolic of amorous dalliance. Savonarola instituted in 1497 a public festival of another kind: a large scaffold was erected in the market-place, a vast number of the finest specimens in painting and sculpture, offensive from their nudities, were collected; the pictures placed on the first step; the sculptures, especially when portraits of first-rate Florentine belles, disposed on the second; the whole inclosed by foreign precious tapestry, and that, with great solemnity, set on fire. The scaffolding of the next year excelled the first in magnificence; its gorgeous apparel invested the busts of the most celebrated beauties of former years; those of the Bencina, Lena Morella, Bina and Maria de'Lenzi, works of the most eminent sculptors; on it was placed a copy of Petrarca, decorated with gold, missal-painting, and miniatures, estimated at fifty scudi d'oro; and to prevent theft, the whole was constantly guarded. The procession approached, surrounded the scaffold, and amid a concert of consecrating hymns, bells, trumpets, cymbals, and the acclamations of the Signoria and the people, the victims, sprinkled with holy water, were delivered to flame by the torches of the guards.[66] Such was the epidemic influence of this enthusiasm, that even artists, the gentle Frà Bartolomeo, Lorenzo di Credi, and many more caught the infection, and contributed to the sacrifice, till the death of Savonarola and the return of the Medici extinguished the furor.[67] The democracy, however, gave origin to two works, which not only atoned for the ravages it had committed, but whose splendour no subsequent æra of art has been able to eclipse, or perhaps to equal: the two Cartoons of Lionardo da Vinci and M. Angelo Buonarroti, destined to decorate the senatorial hall, by order of Pietro Soderini. They produced an immediate revolution in art, but disappeared like meteors in the tumult that attended the reinstatement of the Medici and the fall of the Gonfaloniere, 1512.