Renaissance Blue Smoke Essay

History can be a seductive mistress. She can beguile us with vivid images and works of such beauty that our attention is turned away from the harsh realities of a particular time and place. The Renaissance is a case in point. We study the period with an almost spiritual gaze. As a result, we often see a dream-like and hazy picture -- not unlike the Mona Lisa herself. Rough edges are softened; sfumato-like, the blemishes that might appear on the Madonna’s face – indeed, on the face of the Renaissance itself – vanish as if in a haze of blue smoke.
This short essay is a modest attempt at a clearer vision -- to ask the question: will a more critical assessment of the period provide a better understanding of the era’s great achievements and even

However, earlier in the fifteenth century there existed an itinerant rabble-rouser to whom Savonarola could hardly hold a candle. His name was Barnardino of Siena – perhaps the most vile and rabid preacher in the annals of religious intolerance. But unlike Savonarola he was not executed. Instead, he became immensely popular, nicely remunerated, and eventually canonized. When it came to Jews, a Bernardino event was an eerie foreshadowing of a Nazi rally. In fact, at one of his sermons, the fundamentalist firebrand provided his audience with a helpful list of “truths” which chillingly reads like the Nuremberg “laws” of 1935. Among these “truths”: “… [That it was] a mortal sin to eat with a Jew; a mortal sin to socialize with a Jew; a mortal sin to see a Jewish doctor… [In addition], Jews must be made to wear badges and must not be allowed to construct synagogues (Mormando, 170). Jews were harangued without mercy, but the Franciscan friar reserved a special venom for homosexuality or, in his word, Sodomy. If fact, he was to sodomy what Joe McCarthy was to communism. He taught that “Everything unpredictable or calamitous in human experience can attributed to sodomy, from wars and floods to pestilence and plague (Rocke,