A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [46]
When Copernicus’s chief protégé tried to get his mentor’s paper printed in Nuremberg, Luther used his influence to suppress it. According to Durant, even Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg, who finally agreed to assist with its publication, insisted on an introduction explaining that the concept of a solar system was being presented solely as a hypothesis, useful for the computation of the movements of heavenly bodies. As long as it was so represented, Rome remained mute, but when the philosopher Giordano Bruno
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)
published his Italian dialogues, declaring a rotating, orbiting earth to be an unassailable fact—carrying his astronomical speculations far beyond those of Copernicus—the Roman Inquisition brought him to trial. He was convicted of being the worst kind of heretic, a pantheist who held that God was immanent in creation, rather than the external creator. Then they burned him at the stake. Catholics were forbidden to read Copernicus’s De revolutionibus until the deletion of nine sentences, which had asserted it to be more than a theory. The ban was not lifted until 1828.
LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452–1519), the most versatile creative figure of that age—perhaps of any age—confronted traditional authority with a more awkward problem. His artistic genius guaranteed his immunity from blacklisting heresimachs; for seventeen years Milan’s duke, Ludovico Sforza, shielded him by appointing him ictor et ingeniarius ducalis, and after Ludovico’s fall Leonardo found other sponsors, even serving Cesare Borgia briefly as his military architect. If Cesare’s many crimes deserve to be remembered, as they do, so should this generous gesture. Like the patron himself, however, it was short-lived. Miraculously, the Borgia cardinal manqué had survived to the age of thirty, but now killers with long knives were closing in. Cesare had celebrated his last birthday. His great protégé found new sanctuaries in the courts of the powerful, though, they, too, were to prove temporary, because of all the great Renaissance artists, Da Vinci alone was destined to fall from papal grace.
His disgrace was significant. Leonardo’s transgressions were graver than Botticelli’s or Cellini’s. Indeed, in a larger sense he was a graver menace to medieval society than any Borgia. Cesare merely killed men. Da Vinci, like Copernicus, threatened the certitude that knowledge had been forever fixed by God, the rigid mind-set which left no role for curiosity or innovation. Leonardo’s cosmology, based on what he called saper vedere (knowing how to see) was, in effect, a blunt instrument assaulting the fatuity which had, among other things, permitted a mafia of profane popes to desecrate Christianity.
In the Age of Faith, as Will Durant called the medieval era, one secret of the papacy’s hold on the masses was its capacity to inspire absolute terror, a derivative of the universal belief that whoever wore the tiara could, at his pleasure, determine how each individual would spend his afterlife—cosseted in eternal bliss or shrieking in writhing flames below. His decision might be whimsical, his blessings were often sold openly, his motives might be evil, but that was his prerogative. Earthly life being “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Thomas Hobbes’s memorable phrase, only the deranged would invite the disfavor and retribution of the Holy See.
This accounts for the last extraordinary moments of Girolamo Savonarola’s life. For seven years his Florentine followers had
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), a self-portrait
turned out to cheer his indictments of Pope Alexander VI’s depravity. Now, on the day of his last public appearance, which was also his execution, they flocked into the Piazza della Signoria to taunt and jeer his final agony. He had given Florence the best government the city had ever had. His only local enemies were the Arrabbiati, a political party resentful of his reforms. None of the witnesses to his agony could doubt