This is not a book to read if you are looking for a straight forward account of political events and movements in renaissance Italy: Burckhardt's book is much more ambitious than that. He is intent, no less, on examining why there was a rebirth (renaissance) in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries and how it differed so very much from the straight jacket of medieval culture and society.
The Civilisation of Renaissance Italy was published in 1860 and Jacob Burckhardt was one of the first historians who wished to provide more than just a series of events with an explanation of their cause and effect. His idea was to get under the skin of the culture of the period; to define the character of the society so that the reader is able to understand why people behaved the way they did. In short he wanted to provide as complete a picture as possible and in many ways he is successful. He is strong on the cultural history particularly literature, but also takes into account painting sculpture and architecture. He is also very good on religion, social institutions, society and daily life. What emerges is a real feel for the period and a presentation of the underlying circumstances that led to such rapid changes to the society in that small part of the world. His approach has been labelled as unsystematic, but I would not agree.
There are six parts to the book and each part introduces another subject that builds on what has gone before. He could be criticised for not drawing all the strands together at the end, but this is missing the point as there is plenty of guidance along the way and it is up to us to form our own conclusions. What we should keep in mind is that this is a Victorian perspective and so his central premise that it was the individuality of the Italian character and its unique place in history that was responsible for the renaissance would be challenged to some extent by modern historians. Part 1 is a sort of gallop through the various political states that made up what we now know as modern Italy. Emphasis is on the individuality of these states and how they differed in character from the kingdoms prevalent in the rest of Europe.
Aug 06, 2018 The Renaissance is having a big year. Part of what’s fueling scholarly interest is an historical anniversary: 2018 marks the 200 th birthday of Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), author of what is arguably still the most famous study of the Italian Renaissance, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, first published in 1860.
They were city states where it was said that 'even a servant could become king'. There is a more detailed examination of Venice and Florence, two powerful states with completely different characteristics. Part 2 starts to examine the character of the people within these states concluding that the absence of feudalism and the political culture led to the rise of the individual.
Fame could be achieved in the arts as well as in politics, people began to revel in their own uniqueness, they could educate themselves, there was more freedom than in the more clerically dominated middle ages. Part 3 discusses the huge importance of the rediscovery of antiquity. Particularly relevant to Italians as many of the Latin texts were felt to be their very heritage. This new found humanism was pagan in nature, which led to a discovery of a whole new approach to the world; one that did not involve such a close relationship with Christianity. Humanism and Christianity were viewed by some, as parallel viewpoints Part 4 covers the outward bound Italians, emissaries to other states, explorers and adventurers and a more ready acceptance of the Muslim world with whom there was trade and cultural exchanges.
This part also covers the great strides made in literature and the first hesitant steps in dealing with the inner man, there is also much here on daily life gleaned from poetry and novels. Part 5 is entitled Society and festivals. Burckhardt is again at pains to point out how much this differed from life in the middle ages he says: 'Middle ages had courtly, aristocratic manners and etiquette differing very little in various countries in Europe.
Social life in the renaissance offers the sharpest contrast to medievalism, social intercourse now ignored all distractions of caste and was based largely on the existence of an educated class as we now understand the word' Nobles and burghers dwelt together within the city walls. The church too was not to be used as a means of providing for the younger sons of noble families. Burckhardt claims that women stood on an equal footing with men and also examines costume and fashion, music and the cult of the festivals. Part 6 delves into Morality and Religion and Burkhardt is at his best in this final section.
The corruption within the church, the rediscovery of antiquity and the individuality of character all pointed towards men and women being able to think for themselves. Their religion; whatever form it took came from within rather than being hammered home by the clerical establishment. The old faith of paganism mixed with magic and mysticism also feature along with astrology. Immorality and the lawlessness that abounded in the city states is featured throughout the book but in this final chapter some explanation of this phenomena is given. Burckhardt indulges us with some of the more scandalous stories and I get the feeling that he is a little uncomfortable with some of these. The book is free to download from The Gutenberg Project and although there are a few errors in the text, it is still very readable. Buckhardt writes well and the book seems to get stronger as it goes along with the authors portrayal of renaissance Italy coming together chapter by chapter and leaving the reader with a fine depiction of the period.
A must read for anybody interested in the renaissance with the proviso that this is a somewhat outdated view, but then again there is so much here that feels exactly right to me. For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics. In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche's concept of the 'Ubermensch' in its portrayal of an age of genius.
Jacob Burckhardt’s is one of those cultural monoliths which large numbers of people have heard of, but perhaps ( A Brief History of Time, anyone?) fewer have read. One of my personal misconceptions about the work was that it is about art, when in fact it is more about politics than anything else (it isn’t illustrated at all), and another was that it is about the ‘High’ Renaissance, which it isn’t. Happily, our cover image (of which I had the excitement of seeing the original in the Duomo in Florence a few weeks ago), showing Dante between Florence, Purgatory and Hell, pulls us back into the thirteenth century, where Burckhardt begins his tale. Dante between Hell, Purgatory and Florence, with the Starry Heaven above.Carl Jacob Christoff Burckhardt (1818–97), was Swiss, from Basel, and originally planned and studied to become a Calvinist minister. Graduating in 1839, he went instead to the university of Berlin, where he entered the relatively new academic department of ‘history’, attending the lectures of among others.
He also went to Bonn, to study the even newer discipline of art history, before returning to Basel, where (apart from a three-year period in Zurich) he spent the rest of his life, serving as a professor in the university from 1858 to 1893.His 1860 Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien was preceded by new editions of the works of his Bonn teacher Franz Kugler, and books on the art and architecture of the Flemish cities and on the age of Constantine the Great. After travelling in Italy in 1853–4, he published a guide to the arts of Italy which was hugely popular, and he followed Die Kultur with Die Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien (in 1867).Thankfully for us Brits (and others), in 1878, Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore (1848–90) decided that ‘although Dr Burckhardt’s work is too well known for any introduction to be necessary’, nevertheless, in publishing a translation, he would be ‘meeting a want felt by some who are either unable to read German at all, or to whom an English version will save a good deal of time and trouble’. (I like to feel that I hover nicely between these two cohorts.)I haven’t been able to find out anything about Middlemore except that he translated this book, and that a Mrs S.G.C.
Middlemore published translations of ‘Spanish Legendary Tales’ with lurid titles such as ‘The Walled Nun of Avila’. A George Middlemore (d.
1850) ended up as governor of in 1836, and supervised the removal of Napoleon’s remains from the island in 1840. However, his only mentioned relative is a son, also in the army There is also a philanthropic Sir John Throgmorton Middlemore (a friend of the s), but not apparently of the same family.Anyway, Middlemore’s lucid and fluid prose style in his two-volume translation makes Burckhardt’s story a pleasure to read. Its tenor can be grasped by the chapter headings of Part I: The tyranny of the fourteenth century; The tyranny of the fifteenth century; The petty tyrannies; The greater dynasties; The opponents of tyranny; The republics: Venice and Florence; Foreign policy of the Italian states; War as a work of art; The papacy and its dangers.As our blurb says, this is as much a work of political history as it is of aesthetic development. Burckhardt saw in the figures and events of the Italian Renaissance certain traits that he believed to be mirrored in the politics of his own day, notably some aspects of ‘an unbridled egoism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture’.
He emphasised that statecraft and warfare were the drivers, and perhaps the necessary preconditions, of major artistic developments. (Think and the Swiss cuckoo clocks)Apart from the overarching narrative, there are marvellous titbits. ‘The envoys of Cardinal Bessarion the great Greek diplomat and humanist whose library was bequeathed to Venice and forms the core of the Biblioteca Marciana, when they saw for the first time a printed book laughed at the discovery.’.