Search results
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.
Jan 17, 2021 · These events became known as the ‘bonfire of the vanities’: the biggest of these happened on 7 February 1497, when more than one thousand children scoured the city for luxuries to be burned. The items were thrown on to a huge fire while women, crowned with olive branches, danced around it.
- Sarah Roller
Historians have named it the Bonfire of the Vanities—"vanities" being things that distracted Florentines from their religious duties in the eyes of their current ad-hoc leader, Savonarola.
Feb 2, 2024 · Carnival in Florence was a time of wantonness and riot; under Savonarola it became an orderly ritual of destruction, culminating on 7 February 1497 with what is remembered as the bonfire of the vanities. Piagnoni went door to door demanding the surrender of sinful objects.
May 31, 2018 · Meet the Italian friar who's one of the worst villains in art history and popularised the phrase, Bonfire of the Vanities. Today, the burning of works by a Renaissance master would be viewed as nothing less than cultural vandalism.
The fiery preacher Savonarola, who exercised such influence in Florence in the last decade of the fifteenth century and was responsible for the “bonfire of the vanities” that may have destroyed many beautiful works of Renaissance art, was well aware of the power of both the press and the image.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 American satirical black comedy film directed and produced by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall, and Morgan Freeman.
