CLASSICS |
"It is the historian’s function, not to make us clever for the next time, but to make us wise forever.”--Jacob Burckhardt
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"The great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt projected ninety years ago a series of philosophical and historical studies of Western culture from the age of Constantine to the Renaissance, or which the famous 'Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was to be the closing chapter. Burckhardt saw the clear intelligence, the realism, individualism and love of life of the Florentine, not only as qualities admirable in themselves but as the culmination of a historical development....Burckhardt...saw in the Florentine humanists, artists and patrons alike, men, who living in the midst of political chaos as bad as that of the 15th century BC or the 20th century, achieved a union of the rationalism of the classical world with the Christian heritage of the Middle Ages, thus creating a new spirit which was not only the flowering of a historic process but the key to the destiny of the Western world"--E.P. Richardson, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Vol XXVIII, No.1 1948
* "The struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen left Italy in a political condition which differed essentially from that of other countries in the of the West. While in France, Spain and England the feudal system was so organized at the close of its existence, it was naturally transformed into a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it helped to maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy had shaken it off almost entirely." So begins the preface of one of the most captivating classics of the 19th century, that inexhaustible intellectual gold mine of an epoch whose weightiest treasure was to raise the writing of history into an art form. Just as Oswald Spengler's dense Decline was translated into line-by-line refinement by the great Princetonian Charles Francis Atkinson (1927), our Anglophone readers must must avail themselves of the English language translation of this issue's transporting masterpiece by Samuel George Chetwyn Middlemore (1878), the edition featured here in the image on the upper right-hand side of this page. The importance of The Civilization of the Renaissance is Burckhardt's idea of that era as the origin of the modern Western concept of the self-made man. Though Michelet was the first to define the Renaissance as "the discovery of the world and of man", it was Burckhardt who most brilliantly and beautifully described the ascent of the "Individual" as an historical phenomenon, one that was the direct heir to the more abstractly Christian notion of heroic knighthood of the High Middle Ages. Though le Moyen Âge was disdained by Michelet and other contemporaries of Burke, our author, himself a professor of the Middle Ages in Zürich and Basel, considered that period to be the integral prolegomena to the Gesamtwerk that was the Renaissance mind, as expressed in his lesser-known masterpiece The Age of Constantine (1853) . This is significant because Burckhardt, as a founding father of "The Renaissance" as an historical science, deplored the term, for it sounded "as if during the Middle Ages, all cultural life had been sleeping as though dead". As the scholar Hans Baron observed, Edward Gibbon, in the Epilogue to his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, described the humanistic erudition of the quattrocento as the 'celestial dew' that helped to prepare the ground for what Baron called "the modern vernacular idioms and literatures" and eventually the speculative philosophical and experimental science of the modern age, but above all a veneration of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Anima Poetae defined as the "plain sense, measure, clearness, dignity, grace over all" that "thus made the greatness of Greece"...[Continued in the print edition] |
Published in English by Allen & Unwin, London, 1878. Translated by Samuel George Chetwyn Middlemore
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