There is extant a miracle play from Lorenzo's hand, the acts of the
martyrs Giovanni and Paolo, who suffered in the days of the emperor
Julian. Two sides of Lorenzo's nature are ever in conflict--the
Lorenzo of the ballate and the carnival songs--the Lorenzo of the
_laude_ and spiritual poems, many of which have the unmistakable ring
of sincerity. And, in the story of his last days and the summoning of
Savonarola to his bed-side, the triumph of the man's spiritual side is
seen at the end; he is, indeed, in the position of the dying Julian of
his own play:--
"Fallace vita! O nostra vana cura!
Lo spirto è già fuor del mio petto spinto:
O Cristo Galileo, tu hai vinto."
Such was likewise the attitude of several members of the Medicean
circle, when the crash came. Poliziano followed his friend and patron
to the grave, in September 1494; his last hours received the
consolations of religion from Savonarola's most devoted follower, Fra
Domenico da Pescia (of whom more anon); after death, he was robed in
the habit of St Dominic and buried in San Marco. Pico della Mirandola,
too, had been present at the Magnifico's death-bed, though not there
when the end actually came; he too, in 1494, received the Dominican
habit in death, and was buried by Savonarola's friars in San Marco.
Marsilio Ficino outlived his friends and denied Fra Girolamo; he died
in 1499, and lies at rest in the Duomo.
Of all these Medicean Platonists, Pico della Mirandola is the most
fascinating. A young Lombard noble of almost feminine beauty, full of
the pride of having mastered all the knowledge of his day, he first
came to Florence in 1480 or 1482, almost at the very moment in which
Marsilio Ficino finished his translation of Plato. He became at once
the chosen friend of all the choicest spirits of Lorenzo's circle. Not
only classical learning, but the mysterious East and the sacred lore
of the Jews had rendered up their treasures for his intellectual
feast; his mysticism shot far beyond even Ficino; all knowledge and
all religions were to him a revelation of the Deity. Not only to
Lorenzo and his associates did young Pico seem a phoenix of earthly
and celestial wisdom, _uomo quasi divino_ as Machiavelli puts it; but
even Savonarola in his _Triumphus Crucis_, written after Pico's death,
declares that, by reason of his loftiness of intellect and the
sublimity of his doctrine, he should be numbered amongst the miracles
of God and Nature. Pico had been much beloved of many women, and not
always a Platonic lover, but, towards the close of his short
flower-like life, he burnt "fyve bokes that in his youthe of wanton
versis of love with other lyke fantasies he had made," and all else
seemed absorbed in the vision of love Divine. "The substance that I
have left," he told his nephew, "I intend to give out to poor people,
and, fencing myself with the crucifix, barefoot walking about the
world, in every town and castle I purpose to preach of Christ."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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