Savonarola’s Florence

In 1494 the Medici were expelled from Florence as French forces entered Italy, and the city restored a republican government. The Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola became the most powerful moral and political voice in the new order, denouncing clerical corruption, luxury and the worldly culture associated with the Medici court.

Savonarola's supporters attempted to reshape public life through religious discipline, charitable reform and campaigns against gambling, elaborate dress and secular display. The period became associated with the Bonfire of the Vanities, factional conflict and growing resistance to Savonarola. After losing political support and defying papal authority, he was arrested, tried and executed in 1498.

This context supports fiction about Florence after the Medici expulsion, Savonarola's religious movement, republican politics and the conflict between Renaissance art and moral reform. Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus places a young woman and an artist within this unstable transition from Medici Florence to Savonarola's regime.