Bonfire of The Vanities - in Fiction

In Fiction

The event has been represented or mentioned in varying degrees of detail in a number of works of historical fiction, including George Eliot's Romola (1863), E. R. Eddison's A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's The Palace (1978), Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient - part two 1992, Timothy Findley's Pilgrim (1999), Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus (2003), Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's Rule of Four (2004), Richelle Mead's Succubus Shadows (2010), and the Showtime series The Borgias.

It was also depicted in the PBS series Empires: The Medici, Godfathers of the Renaissance (2003) at the end of the second episode.

Mentioned in the video game Assassin's Creed II, the Bonfire is the setting of a downloadable content portion of the game. In the in-game version, Savonarola had stolen the "Apple of Eden" from Ezio Auditore da Firenze at the end of the Battle of Forli DLC, and used it to hypnotize people into supporting him.

As a metaphor, Tom Wolfe used the event and ritual as the title for his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and its film adaptation.

Margaret Atwood's works allude to the Bonfire, as in her dystopian novels The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003).

This event has also been depicted in Jodorowsky and Manara's "Borgia" comics.

The seventh episode of the second season of The Borgias depicts the 1497 event.

Episode four of the BBC radio comedy series The Leopard in Autumn was intitled "The Burning of the Sanities" and included a bonfire of vanities.

The tenth episode of Season 2 of the CW's Gossip Girl is titled "Bonfire of the Vanity".

The first episode of Season 17 of The Simpsons is called "Bonfire of the Manatees", a play on the name.