Abstract
In the Museum of St. Mark in Venice may be seen a portrait labeled: "Frs Girolamo Savonarola." It is a profile and in it Art has achieved, if not a masterpiece, at least a bit of work that has the power to fascinate the beholder. No feature in itself is attractive; the nose is over-prominent, the lips are thick and protruding, and the eye is strangely unquiet - yet, the whole face, set in the blackness of the friar's cowl, takes hold of the Imagination and casts a kind of spell upon one. Why? Perhaps because the face mirrors the man himself so well, the strange enigmatic Savonarola, who after the lapse of over four hundred years, can still arouse the deepest interest in all students of history, and fascinate then by the ever-recurring problem of how the quiet, retiring youth, thoughtful and prayerful, developed into the man of fire, who denounced the evils of his day in fierce and trumpet tones, and chastised with bitter words the shortcomings of both high and low.