On the 23rd of May 1498, Fra Girolamo Savonarola—the proto-reformer, Dominican friar, and political firebrand—and two of his acolytes were marched out to Florence’s civic square, tried for treason and heresy, and summarily executed on separate gallows. Their bodies were then burned so that no physical vestige of their existence would survive as a relic. Quite possibly, a twelve-year-old-boy named Andrea d’Agolo was there as part of the huge throng that witnessed this gruesome spectacle. He was then apprenticed as a woodcarver, but, in time, the world would come to know him as Andrea del Sarto (“Andrea, son of the tailor”), one of the preeminent artists of the Italian Renaissance.
What the young Andrea might have witnessed on that day in 1498 marked perhaps not the first, but surely the most dramatic, event in a succession of political and social upheavals that gripped the city of Florence for the next thirty-five years. In this turbulent period, the Medici lost and regained power twice in a whirlwind succession of popular uprisings, military campaigns, and brutal sieges that ended only in 1532 when Cosimo de’ Medici restored peace by establishing a family dynasty that would last for the next two centuries.
It is not an insignificant coincidence that Andrea del Sarto’s life was cut short in 1530, possibly by war-borne pestilence, just as a measure of stability was about to return to his city; in other words, this artist’s entire creative career unfolded in the shadow of violent