Jacob Burckhardt

• 1. Introduction

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  Jacob Burckhardt once turned down the most prestigious history chair in Germany, the very seat held by his own teacher, Leopold von Ranke, at the University of Berlin, and went back to Basel instead. That choice, made in 1872, says almost everything about who he was. Here was a Swiss historian who spent nearly his entire life in one city, who declined fame on offer, and who still managed to transform how the world understood the past.

  Born on the 25th of May 1818 in Basel, Burckhardt came from a patrician family with deep roots in Swiss Calvinist culture. He had been trained for the ministry, and his father was a Protestant clergyman. Yet somewhere along the way, a professor named Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette convinced him that ordination was not his calling. He turned instead to history, and the consequences of that pivot are still felt in lecture halls and art galleries today.

  How does a quiet Swiss professor become one of the founders of cultural history? What made his reading of the Renaissance so powerful that it is still widely read more than a century and a half after publication? And what did he see coming, in politics and civilization, that left his contemporaries baffled and later generations unsettled?

• 2. Formation in Berlin and Bonn

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  Burckhardt finished his theology degree in 1839 and headed north to the University of Berlin, drawn by the new and barely respectable field of art history. At Berlin, he sat in the lecture hall of Leopold von Ranke, the man who had worked to make history an academic discipline grounded in documents and records rather than in personal opinion or moralizing narrative.

  Ranke's influence on Burckhardt was real but incomplete. Burckhardt absorbed the discipline of source-based inquiry and then carried it somewhere Ranke had not gone: toward art, architecture, and the texture of daily life as primary evidence. He spent part of 1841 at the University of Bonn, studying under the art historian Franz Theodor Kugler. That relationship proved lasting. Burckhardt dedicated his first book, Die Kunstwerke der belgischen Städte, published in 1842, to Kugler, and he would return to his mentor's work years later, editing new editions of two of Kugler's major texts in 1847.

  In 1838, before his time in Berlin and Bonn had even run its course, Burckhardt had already made his first journey to Italy and published his first important article, on Swiss cathedrals. The pull of Italy never left him. He would spend most of 1853 and 1854 there, gathering material for a work that would eventually be called indispensable by travellers across the continent.

• 3. The Art Guide and Its Italy

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  Der Cicerone appeared in 1855, also dedicated to Kugler, and it covered sculpture, architecture, and painting across the Italian peninsula. Critics and travellers alike found it without peer. One description of the work, preserved in the record, calls it "the finest travel guide that has ever been written." That is a strong claim, and it stuck.

  About half of the original edition was devoted to the art of the Renaissance. That proportion was not accidental. Burckhardt was already thinking hard about the Renaissance as a coherent period, not merely a collection of artworks, and the Cicerone was partly a rehearsal for the argument he would make in full five years later.

  His 1860 Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, translated into English by S. G. C. Middlemore in two volumes in 1878, became the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance in the nineteenth century. Burckhardt argued that the Renaissance drew together art, philosophy, and politics into something that had created, as he put it, "modern man." He may also have been the first historian to use the term "modernity" in a clearly defined academic context, which gives the book a significance beyond art history alone. A companion volume, the Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, followed in 1867.

• 4. Cultural History Against the Grain

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  Burckhardt's method was deliberate opposition. He stood against Hegelianism, against economism as a master key to the past, and against positivism, which had come to dominate scientific discourse including the social sciences. His approach was, by his own design, unsystematic, and that made it threatening to colleagues who wanted history to march in orderly theoretical columns.

  Lionel Gossman has argued that, in stressing art, literature, and architecture as primary evidence, Burckhardt placed himself in the tradition of the French romantic historian Jules Michelet, and saw himself in common with the later Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga. John Lukacs, on the other hand, credited Burckhardt as one of the first historians to rise above the narrow nineteenth-century equation of history with politics. The debate between those two readings has not fully settled.

  Sigfried Giedion captured what Burckhardt actually accomplished in a phrase that has held: "The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well." Together with the German historian Georg Voigt, Burckhardt founded the historical study of the Renaissance as a field. Where Voigt confined his attention to early Italian humanism, Burckhardt ranged across the whole of Renaissance society.

• 5. The Reluctant Professor

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  Burckhardt taught at the University of Basel from 1843 to 1855, then at the Federal Polytechnic School, and returned to Basel in 1858 to hold a professorship until his retirement in 1893. He did not seek a wider stage. He twice declined offers from German universities: Tübingen in 1867, and then, in 1872, Ranke's own chair at Berlin.

  From 1886 onward, he limited his teaching to art history alone. His lecture courses ran for decades, repeated and refined over many years. The lectures known as "Griechische Kulturgeschichte," which became The Greeks and Greek Civilization, were first delivered in 1872 and repeated until 1885. At the time of his death on the 8th of August 1897, he was still at work on a four-volume survey of Greek civilization, which was published posthumously with contributions from others.

  His lectures on Western history between 1865 and 1885, published as Judgments on History and Historians, ranged from antiquity through the Age of Revolution, covering the Middle Ages and the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Another set of lectures, delivered at Basel, were published in 1943 by Pantheon Books under the title Force and Freedom: An Interpretation of History by Jacob Burckhardt.

• 6. Nietzsche and the Basel Circle

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  Friedrich Nietzsche arrived at Basel in 1869 as professor of classical philology, appointed at the remarkable age of twenty-four. He admired Burckhardt and attended some of his lectures. Both men shared an admiration for Arthur Schopenhauer, whose pessimism about human progress resonated with each of them, though in different registers.

  Nietzsche believed Burckhardt agreed with the central thesis of The Birth of Tragedy, that Greek culture was defined by the tension between what Nietzsche called "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" tendencies. Burckhardt, for his part, enjoyed Nietzsche's intellectual company while keeping a careful distance from where Nietzsche's philosophy was heading. Their extensive correspondence over several years has been published and stands as a record of one of the more unusual intellectual friendships in nineteenth-century European letters.

  Burckhardt's student Heinrich Wölfflin succeeded him at Basel at the age of only twenty-eight. Wölfflin's own successor, Werner Kaegi, devoted his entire career to a six-volume intellectual biography of Burckhardt, and also translated the work of Johan Huizinga into German. Gossman has described the correspondence between Kaegi and Huizinga as evidence that Huizinga saw himself as having inherited Burckhardt's intellectual mantle.

• 7. Politics and Prophecy

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  Burckhardt watched nineteenth-century Europe with the detachment of a Swiss who had no stake in German nationalism and no patience for the cultural superiority claims that German intellectual life was busy making. Switzerland's relative stability and democratic character gave him a vantage point unlike that of his German contemporaries.

  He was not an optimist about what he saw. He commented in lectures and writings on the Industrial Revolution, on European political upheavals, and on the growing current of nationalism and militarism across the continent. His prediction that violent demagogues, whom he called "terrible simplifiers," would dominate a cataclysmic twentieth century, was made well before that century arrived, and the record of that century confirmed what he feared.

  In his later years he grew unimpressed by democracy, individualism, and socialism alike. On the relationship between states and debt, he observed directly: "The state incurs debts for politics, war, and other higher causes and 'progress'.... The assumption is that the future will honor this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy. Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief." That passage was written more than a century before the sovereign debt crises it seems to describe.

  A year after his death, the Swiss engraver Hans Frei, born in 1868, was commissioned to make a commemorative medal in his honour. Burckhardt was also featured on the Swiss thousand franc banknote. In 2018, the British Academy hosted an international conference marking his bicentenary, tasking an interdisciplinary team of scholars to interrogate both his agenda and the continuing validity of the very label he had helped make famous: the Italian Renaissance.