the Masque of Florence is the whole city
dressed chimerically as foxes
and lions intent on calamity
while the divided polis detoxes
from Christ - marching in dreadful rings
full of eyes about secular fires
of paint and parchment- those magic things
- of Savonarola their failed friar
in dumb show acting out how attached
they still are to the expected Prince
whose Ixion’s wheel should dole potlatch
to each of the masquerading claimants -
who denies dancers any bravado
while snapping virtu on the strappado
Oxford
12 October 2018
The Florentine Republic had a chronic division between Medicean rule ( 1434-94, 1512-27 -and thereafter from 1531) and attempts at a revived republic between 1494-1512 and 1527-31. The Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98) attempted to make the city a theocracy between 1494-98. The strappado was the torture instrument inflicted on him.
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) worked for a republican government but envisaged his Prince. Just as Dante longed for Emperor Heinrich VII, and Savonarola for the French king Charles VIII, so did Machiavelli desire a ruler like Cesare Borgia. His Florence of republican virtu coexists with the wheeled angels of Ezekiel 1:18 in this sonnet.
Masques are perhaps a form of drama that presents, exhibits, distributes and circulates an issue or problem, and then “parks” it. It hardly resolves such a problem through normal dramaturgy. Florence was where masques known as intermezzi began in the 15th century.