It was in the church of San Marco that Savonarola celebrated Mass on
the day of the Ordeal; here the women waited and prayed, while the
procession set forth; and hither the Dominicans returned at evening,
amidst the howls and derision of the crowd. Here, on the next evening,
the fiercest of the fighting took place. The attempt of the enemy to
break into the church by the sacristy door was repulsed. One of the
Panciatichi, a mere boy, mortally wounded, joyfully received the last
sacraments from Fra Domenico on the steps of the altar, and died in
such bliss, that the rest envied him. Finally the great door of the
church was broken down; Fra Enrico, a German, mounted the pulpit and
fired again and again into the midst of the Compagnacci, shouting with
each shot, _Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine_. Driven from the pulpit,
he and other friars planted their arquebusses beneath the Crucifix on
the high altar, and continued to fire. The church was now so full of
smoke that the friars could hardly continue the defence, until Fra
Giovacchino della Robbia broke one of the windows with a lance. At
last, when the Signoria threatened to destroy the whole convent with
artillery, Savonarola ordered the friars to go in procession from the
church to the dormitory, and himself, taking the Blessed Sacrament
from the altar, slowly followed them.
The convent itself, now officially the _Museo di San Marco_,
originally a house of Silvestrine monks, was made over to the
Dominicans by Pope Eugenius IV., at the instance of Cosimo dei Medici
and his brother Lorenzo. They solemnly took possession in 1436, and
Michelozzo entirely rebuilt the whole convent for them, mainly at the
cost of Cosimo, between 1437 and 1452. "It is believed," says Vasari,
"to be the best conceived and the most beautiful and commodious
convent of any in Italy, thanks to the virtue and industry of
Michelozzo." Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, as the Beato Angelico was
called, came from his Fiesolan convent, and worked simultaneously with
Michelozzo for about eight or nine years (until the Pope summoned him
to Rome in 1445 to paint in the Vatican), covering with his mystical
dreams the walls that his friend designed. That other artistic glory
of the Dominicans, Fra Bartolommeo, took the habit here in 1500,
though there are now only a few unimportant works of his remaining in
the convent. Never was there such a visible outpouring of the praying
heart in painting, as in the work of these two friars. And Antoninus
and Savonarola strove to make the spirit world that they painted a
living reality, for Florence and for the Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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