1 Prime pagine ok.indd - accademia degli intronati

Mary, sovereign of Siena, Jesus, king of Florence 49
by republican Florence to placate Pope Clement VII and by republican
Siena to placate Emperor Charles V.
Yet, the workings of the submission were not on their own
sufficient; to access God and his mother in this way, this secular ritual
required sanctification. At Siena, Perugia, and Genoa, the key offering
was integrated into a religious ceremony, which at Siena (after 1260)
and Genoa took place in the cathedral during mass. At Florence, the New
Republic elected Christ its king in the great hall of the great council,
which is a significant difference, though Savonarola had deemed this a
holy place. The submission was also, as noted, sometimes joined to the
supplication and its powerful appeal for divine mercy; and at Florence,
Savonarola believed that Christ’s kingship was a consequence of the
religious reforms he had introduced, while the New Republic convinced
itself that its being, or becoming, a just republic qualified it for this
singular honor. At Genoa in 1637, the state also made its coronation
submission a religious event with a universal display of gratitude for the
Virgin’s past favors.
Taken together, these new devotions, topped by the submission
ritual, reached the outermost limit as regards attempts at rendering “the
gods” servants of human material needs (compared to which those of
the ancient world appear on balance to have been more conservative,
notwithstanding Rome’s gross acts of religious expediency during the
Second Punic War). This experimentation, though it had many specific
causes, including elevated levels of crisis, was also a product of its
age – an age that strove to achieve miraculous results in the areas of
magic (black magic), alchemy, astrology, and even astronomy, whose
practitioners sought professional status through esoteric learning and
university degrees 11 . Such bald worldly ambition is sometimes attributed
11 Which also, fittingly, gave us the legendary Dr. Faustus, who became a byword for unbridled
ambition. For the real Dr. Faustus, H.G. HAILE, The History of Doctor Faustus (Urbana IL, 1965). This
age was also much enamored of exotic ancient wisdom as epitomized in the work attributed to Hermes
Trismegistus, whose knowledge stretched from philosophy to magic (practical-technical knowledge).
His figure was represented in the mosaic pavement of Siena cathedral in 1488.