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.

[3] The focus of this destruction was on objects that might tempt one to sin, including vanity items such as mirrors, cosmetics, fine dresses, playing cards, and musical instruments.

The art historian Rab Hatfield says that one of Botticelli's paintings, The Mystical Nativity, cryptically dated 1500, is based on the sermon Savonarola delivered on Christmas Eve, 1493.

[13] Writing several centuries later in 1851, Orestes Brownson, an apologist for Savonarola, vaguely mentions artworks by Fra Bartolomeo, Lorenzo di Credi, and "many other painters", along with "several antique statues" being burnt in the bonfire.

[14] The event has been represented or mentioned in varying degrees of detail in several 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 (1992), Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley's If at Faust You Don't Succeed (1993), Timothy Findley's Pilgrim (1999), Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's Rule of Four (2004), Jeanne Kalogridis's I, Mona Lisa (2006), Traci L. Slatton's The Botticelli Affair (2013), and Jodi Taylor's No Time Like the Past (2015), and in television dramas including the Showtime series The Borgias, The Sky (Italy) and the Netflix (North America) series Borgia, and the third season (2019) of the Netflix (North America) series Medici in the final episode titled "The Fate of the City".