Fiorenza is Thomas Mann's only completed play. It premiered on 11 May 1907 at the Frankfurt Playhouse.
Fiorenza is Thomas Mann's only completed play. It premiered on 11 May 1907 at the Frankfurt Playhouse.
The play takes place in 1492 in Florence. It features the eloquent preacher Girolamo Savonarola. He had once courted Fiorenza, but was rejected. Now Savonarola preaches asceticism. Fiorenza is an allegory for the city of Florence, and is the mistress of the dying Lorenzo de' Medici, the secular ruler of the city.
Fiorenza cannot escape the charismatic Savonarola, even if she had rejected him as a lover. She confronts the dying Lorenzo de' Medici with this. The art-loving, secular ruler recognizes the religious leader as an equal and calls him brother.
The play was not a success in the theater; it was strongly criticized by Alfred Kerr. Other critics such as Theodor Lessing and Richard Schaukal stated the weakness of the play was the allegorical figure of Fiore Fiorenza. Mann's failure as a playwright probably brought him to the judgment that theater can be justified only as a popular entertainment.
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Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici was an Italian statesman, banker, de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic, and the most powerful and enthusiastic patron of Renaissance culture in Italy. Also known as Lorenzo the Magnificent by contemporary Florentines, he was a magnate, diplomat, politician and patron of scholars, artists, and poets. As a patron, he is best known for his sponsorship of artists such as Botticelli and Michelangelo. He held the balance of power within the Italic League, an alliance of states that stabilized political conditions on the Italian peninsula for decades, and his life coincided with the mature phase of the Italian Renaissance and the Golden Age of Florence. On the foreign policy front, Lorenzo manifested a clear plan to stem the territorial ambitions of Pope Sixtus IV, in the name of the balance of the Italian League of 1454. For these reasons, Lorenzo was the subject of the Pazzi conspiracy (1478), in which his brother Giuliano was assassinated. The Peace of Lodi of 1454 that he supported among the various Italian states collapsed with his death. He is buried in the Medici Chapel in Florence.
The House of Medici was an Italian banking family and political dynasty that first consolidated power in the Republic of Florence under Cosimo de' Medici, during the first half of the 15th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of Tuscany, and prospered gradually until it was able to fund the Medici Bank. This bank was the largest in Europe during the 15th century and facilitated the Medicis' rise to political power in Florence, although they officially remained citizens rather than monarchs until the 16th century.
Girolamo Savonarola, OP or Jerome Savonarola was an ascetic Italian Dominican friar from Ferrara and preacher active in Renaissance Florence. He was known for his prophecies of civic glory, the destruction of secular art and culture, and his calls for Christian renewal. He denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule, and the exploitation of the poor.
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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when, at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance", and a key text of Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the "Hermetic Reformation". He was the founder of the tradition of Christian Kabbalah, a key tenet of early modern Western esotericism. The 900 Theses was the first printed book to be universally banned by the Church. Pico is sometimes seen as a proto-Protestant, because his 900 theses anticipated many Protestant views.
Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici, called Piero the Fatuous or Piero the Unfortunate, was the lord of Florence from 1492 until his exile in 1494.
The Republic of Florence, officially the Florentine Republic, was a medieval and early modern state that was centered on the Italian city of Florence in Tuscany. The republic originated in 1115, when the Florentine people rebelled against the Margraviate of Tuscany upon the death of Matilda of Tuscany, who controlled vast territories that included Florence. The Florentines formed a commune in her successors' place. The republic was ruled by a council known as the Signoria of Florence. The signoria was chosen by the gonfaloniere, who was elected every two months by Florentine guild members.
Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, nicknamed the Popolano, was an Italian banker and politician, the brother of Giovanni il Popolano. He belonged to the junior branch of the House of Medici of Florence.
Alessandro de' Medici, nicknamed "il Moro" due to his dark complexion, Duke of Penne and the first Duke of the Florentine Republic, was ruler of Florence from 1530 to his death in 1537. The first Medici to rule Florence as a hereditary monarch, Alessandro was also the last Medici from the senior line of the family to lead the city. His assassination at the hands of distant cousin Lorenzaccio caused the title of Duke to pass to Cosimo I de Medici, from the family's junior branch.
A bonfire of the vanities is a burning of objects condemned by religious authorities as occasions of sin. The phrase itself usually refers to the bonfire of 7 February 1497, when supporters of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola collected and burned thousands of objects such as cosmetics, art, and books in the public square of Florence, Italy, on the occasion of Shrove Tuesday, martedí grasso.
Piero di Tommaso Soderini also known as Pier Soderini, was an Italian statesman of the Republic of Florence.
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The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) is a biographical novel of Michelangelo Buonarroti written by American author Irving Stone. Stone lived in Italy for years visiting many of the locations in Rome and Florence, worked in marble quarries, and apprenticed himself to a marble sculptor. A primary source for the novel is Michelangelo's correspondence, all 495 letters of which Stone had translated from Italian by Charles Speroni and published in 1962 as I, Michelangelo, Sculptor. Stone also collaborated with Canadian sculptor Stanley Lewis, who researched Michelangelo's carving technique and tools. The Italian government lauded Stone with several honorary awards for his cultural achievements highlighting Italian history.
While Florence itself needs no introduction as the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance, the music of Florence may, in fact, need such an introduction. The city was at the heart of much of the entire Western musical tradition. It was here that the Florentine Camerata convened in the mid-16th century and experimented with setting tales of Greek mythology to music and staging the result—in other words, the first operas, setting the wheels in motion not just for the further development of the operatic form, but for later developments of separate "classical" forms such as the symphony.
Giovanni de' Medici, in full Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, later known as il Popolano was an Italian nobleman of the Medici House of Florence. He was the son of Pierfrancesco di Lorenzo de' Medici, and therefore a member of a secondary branch of the family.
Clarice Orsini (1453–1488) was the daughter of Iacopo Orsini, and his wife and cousin Maddalena Orsini both from the Orsini family, a great Roman noble house and was the wife of Lorenzo de' Medici.
Michelangelo had a complicated relationship with the Medici family, who were for most of his lifetime the effective rulers of his home city of Florence. The Medici rose to prominence as Florence's preeminent bankers. They amassed a sizable fortune some of which was used for patronage of the arts. Michelangelo's first contact with the Medici family began early as a talented teenage apprentice of the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. Following his initial work for Lorenzo de' Medici, Michelangelo's interactions with the family continued for decades including the Medici papacies of Pope Leo X and Pope Clement VII.
This timeline lists important events relevant to the life of the Italian diplomat, writer and political philosopher Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469–1527).
Bianca de' Medici was a member of the de' Medici family, de facto rulers of Florence in the late 15th century. She was the daughter of Piero di Cosimo de' Medici, de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic, and sister of Lorenzo de' Medici, who succeeded his father in that position. She married Guglielmo de' Pazzi, a member of the Pazzi family. She was a musician, and played the organ for Pope Pius II and the future Pope Alexander VI in 1460; she was a landowner.
The Piagnoni were a group of Christians who followed the teachings of Girolamo Savonarola. The later Piagnoni remained in the Catholic Church and kept a mixture with the teachings of Catholic dogma and the teachings of Girolamo Savonarola. The name Piagnoni was given because they wept for their sins and the sins of the world.
