The Rule of Four

way Paul smiles.

Chapter 22

We begin making trips back and forth from the carrel, replacing dozens of books, most of them on shelves where they don't belong. Paul only seems to care that they're out of sight.

Do you remember what was going on in Italy just before the Hypnerotomachia was published? he asks.

Just what was in the Vatican tour book.

Paul lifts another pile of books into my arms as we walk back into the darkness.

The intellectual life of Italy during Francesco's day revolves around a single city, he says.

Rome.

But Paul shakes his head. Smaller than that. The size of Princeton-the campus, not the town.

I see how enchanted he is by what he's found, how real it's become for him already.

In that town, he says, you've got more intellectuals than anyone knows what to do with. Geniuses. Polymaths. Thinkers who are gunning for the big answers to the big questions. Autodidacts who have taught themselves ancient languages no one else knows. Philosophers who are combining religious points from the Bible with ideas from Greek and Roman texts, Egyptian mysticism, Persian manuscripts so old nobody knows how to date them. The absolute cutting edge of humanism. Think of the riddles. University professors playing Rithmomachia. Translators interpreting Horapollo. Anatomists revising Galen.

In my mind's eye the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore comes into focus. My father liked to call it the mother city of modern scholarship. Florence, I say.

Right. But that's only the beginning. In every other discipline, you've got the biggest names in Europe. In architecture you've got Brunelleschi, who engineered the largest cathedral dome in a thousand years. In sculpture you've got Ghiberti, who created a set of reliefs so beautiful that they're known as the doors of paradise. And you've got Ghiberti's assistant, who grows up to become the father of modern sculpture-Donatello.

The painters weren't bad either, I remind him.

Paul smiles. The single greatest concentration of genius in the history of Western art, all in this little town. Applying new techniques, inventing new theories of perspective, transforming painting from a craft into a science and an art. There must've been three dozen of them, like Alberti, who would've been considered first-class anywhere else in the world. But in this town, they're second-rate. That's because they're competing with the giants. Masaccio. Botticelli. Michelangelo.

As the momentum of his ideas increases, his feet move faster down the dark hallways.

You want scientists? he says. How about Leonardo da Vinci. You want politicians? Machiavelli. Poets? Boccaccio and Dante. And a lot of these guys were contemporaries. On top of it all, you have the Medici, a family so rich it could afford to patronize as many artists and intellectuals as the town could produce.

All of them, together, in the same small city, at basically the same time. The greatest cultural heroes in all of Western history, crossing each other in the streets, knowing each other on a first-name basis, talking to each other, working together, competing, influencing and pushing each other to go further than they could've gone alone. All in a place where beauty and truth are king, where leading families fight over who can commission the greatest art, who can subsidize the most brilliant thinkers, who can own the biggest library. Imagine that. All of that. It's like a dream. An impossibility.

We return to his carrel and he finally takes a seat.

Then, in the last few years of the fifteenth century, just before the Hypnerotomachia is written, something even more amazing happens. Something that every Renaissance scholar knows about, but that no one has ever connected with the book. Francesco's riddle kept talking about a powerful preacher in the land of his brethren. I just couldn't figure out what the connection could be.

I thought Luther wasn't until 1517. Colonna was writing in the 1490s.

Not Luther, he says. In the late 1400s, a Dominican monk was sent to Florence to join a monastery called San Marco.

Suddenly it dawns on me. Savonarola.

The great evangelical preacher, who galvanized Florence at the turn of the century, trying to restore the city's faith at any cost.

Exactly, Paul says. Savonarola's a straight arrow-the straightest you'd ever meet. And when he gets to Florence, he begins to preach. He tells people that their behavior is wicked, their culture and art are profane, their government is unjust. He says God looks unkindly on them. He tells them to repent.

I shake my head.

I know how it sounds, Paul goes on, but he's right. In a way, the Renaissance is a godless time. The Church is corrupt. The pope's a political appointee. Prospero Colonna, Francesco's uncle, allegedly dies of gout, and some people think Pope Alexander poisoned him because he came from a rival family. That's the kind of world it is, where people suspect the pope of murder. And that was only the beginning-they suspected him of sadism, incest, you name it.

Meanwhile, for all of its cutting-edge art and scholarship, Florence is in constant upheaval. Factions fight each other in the streets, prominent families plot against each other to gain power, and even though the city is supposedly a republic, the Medici control everything. Death is common, extortion and coercion are even more common, injustice and inequality are a rule of life. It's a pretty disturbing place, considering all the beautiful things that come out of it.

So Savonarola arrives in Florence and sees evil wherever he looks. He urges the citizens to clean up their lives, to stop gambling, to start reading the Bible, to help the poor and feed the hungry. At San Marco he begins to gain a following. Even some of the leading humanists admire him. They realize he's well read and conversant about philosophy. Little by little, Savonarola's on the rise.

I stop him. I thought this was still while the Medici controlled the city.

Paul shakes his head. Unfortunately for them, their newest heir, Piero, was a fool. He couldn't run the city. The people began to clamor for liberty, a hallowed cry in Florence, and finally the Medici were expelled. Remember the forty-eighth woodcut? The child in the chariot, butchering the two women?

The one Taft showed in his lecture.

Right. That's how Vincent always interpreted it. The punishment was supposed to be for treason. Did he say what he thought it meant?

No, He wanted the audience to solve it.

But he asked about the child in it. Why does he have a sword-something like that?

I can picture Taft standing beneath the image, his shadow cast onto the screen. Why does he make the women pull his chariot through the forest, then kill them that way? I say.

Vincent's theory was that the Cupid figure was supposed to be Piero, the new Medici heir. Piero behaved like a child, so that's how the artist represented him. Because of him, the Medici lost their hold on Florence and were thrown out. So the woodcuts show him retreating through the woods.

So who are the women?

Florence and Italy, Vincent says. By acting like a child, Piero destroyed them both.

Seems possible.

It's a decent interpretation, Paul agrees, patting his hand on the underside of his desk, searching for something. Just not the right one. Vincent refused to accept that the acrostic rule was the key. He would never believe that the first of those images was the important one. He could only see things his way.

The point is, when the Medici were expelled, the other leading families met to discuss a new government in Florence. The only problem was, no one trusted anyone else. In the end they agreed to let Savonarola take a place of authority. He was the one man everyone knew was incorruptible.

So Savonarola's popularity grows even more. People begin to take his sermons to heart. Shopkeepers start reading the Bible in their spare time. Gamblers aren't as open about their card games. Drinking and disorder seem to be on the decline. But Savonarola sees that the evils persist. So he steps up his program for civic and spiritual