Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 624 pages of information about Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7).

Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 624 pages of information about Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7).
is ugly, but not repellent; and, in spite of its great strength, it shows signs of feminine sensibility.  Like the faces of Cicero and Demosthenes, it seems the fit machine for oratory.  But the furnaces hidden away behind that skull, beneath that cowl, have made it haggard with a fire not to be found in the serener features of the classic orators.  Savonarola was a visionary and a monk.  The discipline of the cloister left its trace upon him.  The wings of dreams have winnowed and withered that cheek as they passed over it.  The spirit of prayer quivers upon those eager lips.  The color of Savonarola’s flesh was brown:  his nerves were exquisitely sensitive yet strong; like a network of wrought steel, elastic, easily overstrained, they recovered their tone and temper less by repose than by the evolution of fresh electricity.  With Savonarola fasts were succeeded by trances, and trances by tempests of vehement improvization.  From the midst of such profound debility that he could scarcely crawl up the pulpit steps, he would pass suddenly into the plenitude of power, filling the Dome of Florence with denunciations, sustaining his discourse by no mere trick of rhetoric that flows to waste upon the lips of shallow preachers, but marshaling the phalanx of embattled arguments and pointed illustrations, pouring his thought forth in columns of continuous flame, mingling figures of sublimest imagery with reasonings severest accuracy, at one time melting his audience tears, at another freezing them with terror, again quickening their souls with prayers and pleadings and blessings that had in them the sweetness of the very spirit of Christ.  His sermons began with scholastic exposition; as they advanced, the ecstasy of inspiration fell upon the preacher, till the sympathies of the whole people of Florence gathered round him,[2] met and attained, as it were, to single consciousness in him.  He then no longer restrained the impulse of his oratory, but became the mouthpiece of God, the interpreter to themselves of all that host.  In a fiery crescendo, never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of vision, he ascended the altar steps of prophecy, and, standing like Moses on the mount between the thunders of God and the tabernacles of the plain, fulminated period after period of impassioned eloquence.  The walls of the church re-echoed with sobs and wailings dominated by one ringing voice.  The scribe to whom we owe the fragments of these sermons, at times breaks off with these words:  ’Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on.’  Pico della Mirandola tells us that the mere sound of Savonarola’s voice, startling the stillness of the Duomo, thronged through all its space with people, was like a clap of doom:  a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, the hairs of his head stood on end, as he listened.  Another witness reports:  ’These sermons caused such terror, alarm, sobbing, and tears that every one passed through the streets without speaking, more dead than alive.’

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Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.