Savonarola, Dominican Monk (1452-1498)
Some cultures are so spiritually poisonous, they need to be burned.
Lorenzo the Magnificent ruled Florence. He was filthy rich and the most flamboyant of the Medici. If Harvey Weinstein is the poster child of Hollywood's decadence, Lorenzo was the poster boy of Florence's decadence: rich, flamboyant, and licentious.
Cue Savonarola. He started preaching fiery sermons from San Marcos, calling the Florentines to repent and to reform and calling out Lorenzo's excesses. Lorenzo tried to be conciliatory with the monk, but it didn't work, and when Lorenzo died in 1492, Savonarola led the ouster of the Medici family and became the de facto spiritual and political head of the city.
He and his fierce supporters, the Piagnoni, roamed Florence and strong-armed people to surrender their ornaments of decadence: broaches, necklaces, fine scarves. People yielded up obscene art. It was all burned: the bonfire of the vanities.
Was he just a proto-Puritan? Not really. Savonarola wasn't a gnostic like the Puritans, all epistemologically smug in their left-hemispheric-dominated worldview. He was just a hater: a hater of sin, and when he encountered a culture infused with it, he knew it needed to be burned down.
"He saw that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms; that the disease was a complete dependence upon jewels and wine and pictures." G.K. Chesterton, Twelve Types.
Savonarola has become semi-synonymous with book burning and art hating. That's grossly inaccurate, as his friendships with Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, Michelangelo, and Botticelli shows. He didn't hate culture. He just hated shitty culture, and contrary to the testimony of decadent modern art, culture doesn't have to be shitty and, indeed, ought not be. Culture ought to make men good, honest, and just. A shitty culture does the exact opposite.
Savonarola's experiment with radical democracy ended fairly quickly. That most corrupt of all popes, Alexander VI, excommunicated him. He was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1498.
Postscript
I'll let the last word about Savonarola come from Will Durant. That lapsed Catholic and skeptic's view supports this micro-bio and its assertion that, far from being a culture-hating Puritan, Savonarola was a great man:
The grandeur of Savonarola lay in his effort to achieve a moral revolution, to make men honest, good, and just. We know that this is the most difficult of all revolutions, and we cannot wonder that Savonarola failed where Christ succeeded with so pitiful a minority of men. But we know, too, that such a revolution is the only one that would mark a real advance in human affairs; and that beside it the bloody overturns of history are transient and ineffectual spectacles.
Sources consulted:
Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia (Fourth Edition)
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church
Will Durant, The Renaissance (book 5 of his 11-volume series, The Story of Civilization, an audio version of which is free (as of January 2026) with a public library Hoopla subscription).