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George Eliot: Florence

George Eliot's magnificent study of character concerns itself with Florence at the time when Christopher Columbus was discovering America, when Savonarola was prior to Saint Mark's and ruled the city by his moral energy and his fanaticism, when his pious frenzies, his visions, and his predictions of heavenly wrath seemed to the majority of his fellow-citizens as coming from a more than mortal source; when Charles VIII of France invaded Italy; when the plague brought dire dismay; when the city was distraught by the struggles of the austere devotees of Savonarola and the gay partizans of pleasure; when the mighty ones of the land were united against poor distracted Florence; when Piero de' Medici was conspiring to regain the power once held by Lorenzo the Magnificent; when finally Florence turned against Savonarola, and he met his death in ignominy or martyrdom, as one viewed it as foe or partizan. Across the scene there flit the figures of Pico della Mirandola, of Fra Bartolommeo, of Domenico Ghirlandajo, of Cosimo di Piero, of Poliziano, of Bernardo del Nero, of Strozzis and Tornabuonis, of Niccolo Machiavelli, of a "promising youth named Michelangelo Buonarotti," and many others. All these make the setting for the lives of a woman and a man and the progress of their souls, the one upward and the other downward, as wonderfully drawn as ever human lives were portrayed by pen of man or woman.