Jacob Burckhardt's famous monograph, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (hereafter referred to as Civilization), remains, despite its age, one of the most influential works of history ever published. It would not be unduly charitable to credit Burckhardt’s work as driving force behind the conception of the renaissance as a distinct historical period in of itself; one that varied significantly from the preceding middle ages. Much of our modern understanding of the central thematics of the renaissance is derived from Burckhardt’s descriptions as well--the “renaissance man”, the age of humanism and and the unbridled violence of the period are all central themes of Civilization. The empirical conclusions and literary analysis within Civilization have largely been upheld despite the 156 years since its publication, in no small part due to Burckhardt’s painstaking archival work and exceptional breadth of literacy. In critiquing Civilization, my analysis will largely be concerned with the historiographic methodology and theoretical assumptions regarding the nature of history that underlie Burckhardt’s writing. Because Burckhardt posits no explicit theory of history to frame his conclusions within, the underlying theoretical framework must be extracted from the text: the subjects Burckhardt has chosen to study and those he ignores, his descriptions of causation and teleology, as well as his depiction of the importance of the individual all reveal a guiding theory of history. It is my contention that Burckhardt’s theory of history is premised upon an an understanding that the character and makeup of a society is primarily informed by its aesthetic accomplishments. In this instance, what I refer to by the use of the term “aesthetic” is the body of artistic, literary, and philosophic works produced by the society, or what is often referred to as “high culture.” For Burckhardt, the major sociopolitical developments of a nation can ultimately be best explained through these artistic movements. Central to Burckhardt’s conception of aesthetic development is the role of the ‘Great Man’, or classes of ‘Great Men.’ The eponymous figure in Burckhardt's text is Dante Alighieri, whom Burckhardt credits as the original producer of many of the aesthetic forms and ideals of the Renaissance. The great man, in Civilization, can also be a class of men, as Burckhardt treats the early humanists; an exceptionally influential, if flawed, sector of the artistic nobility. Underlying Burckhardt’s depiction of the many influential figures in Civilization is a pseudo-Nietzschean understanding of the ideal individual--a figure who transcends history, and, in the case of Civilization, is capable of adapting the best of antiquity to a modern form without being subsumed by burden of history and resorting to imitation or worship. This Nietzschean depiction of the ideal individual is surely no coincidence considering Burckhardt and Nietzsche corresponded extensively and taught together at the University of Basel. As I will proceed to argue, Burckhardt’s theory of history is premised upon the conception that these great individuals, exercising unbridled individualism, attained a transcendent artistic genius in all matters of life--and it is the aesthetic achievements of such individuals which gave their age--indeed, any age--its unique character. 

​

From the earliest pages of Civilization, Buckhardt establishes the importance of artistry in shaping the structure of a civilization.  Describing aspects of Italian society as seemingly removed from the artistic theater as statesmanship and the home life, Burckhardt paints a picture of a society where every aspect is aestheticized to a high degree. “As the majority of the Italian States were in their internal constitution works of art, that is, the fruit of reflection and careful adaptation, so was their relation to one another and to foreign countries also a work of art...the purely objective treatment of international affairs, as free from prejudice as from moral scruples, attained a perfection which sometimes is not without a certain beauty and grandeur of its own” (Burckhardt 57). Burckhardt also describes the internal organization of the manor and homelife as possessing an artistic form. “This society, at all events at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was a matter of art; and had, and rested on, tacit or avowed rules of good sense and propriety, which are the exact reverse of all mere etiquette” (Burckhardt 232). What is significant about Burckhardt’s depiction of the aesthetic society is that these elements of the structure, politics and high society, are not merely influenced by prevalence of artistic production during this period but are, in of themselves, works of art. The internal harmony of high society and the ordered logic of the laws of international politics are both beautiful to Burckhardt--beautiful in the same sense that one might describe the visible mastery of composition in a painting. This analogy can be extended further; statecraft and the rules of polite society have achieved their heights, like a painting, through measured reflection and repeated practice with the aim of perfection in mind. The essentially artistic character of societal elements extends to every realm of Renaissance civilization that Burckhardt describes. Burckhardt’s historiography is guided by this vision of history, which attributes an essentially artistic nature to all social forms; in doing so, Burckhardt studies them as an art historian might--as consciously constructed entities which, like an artistic movement, aim to achieve certain expressive forms, and which are significantly influenced by the contributions of great men (in the Nietzschean sense) who guide the direction of the artistic discourse. In its most essentialized form, Burckhardt’s understanding of renaissance civilization is premised upon a somewhat Hegelian vision, which, contra Marx, elevates the aesthetic/ideal elements of a society (superstructural) to a level of significance where it is they that directly influence the forms that daily life and economic production (the base) will take, rather than the reverse, Marxist interpretation.

 

Burckhardt’s aestheticized conception of renaissance civilization is a foundational first principle upon which his larger theory of history is constructed. Within this artistic framework there are specific individuals who possess extraordinary influence over the development of the “movement” and are able, due to their genius, to directly shift these sociocultural paradigms. Burckhardt’s emphasis on the individual is in part why the trope of the renaissance man so dominates historical depictions of this era. It is the individual within their own sphere of activity who is capable of enlightened, creative genius, and who possesses the power to influence lesser men. For Burckhardt, the greatest of such men was Dante. In the course of Civilization, Burckhardt credits Dante with spearheading the revival of antiquity, introducing the political critique as a literary form, and perhaps most significantly, depicts Dante as an essential figure in establishing the importance of the role of the individual who possesses free will and agency. A few passages from Civilization will suffice to establish the importance which Burckhardt lays upon Dante. Regarding the reemergence of antiquity:

“To begin with Dante if a succession of men of equal genius had presided over Italian culture, whatever elements their natures might have absorbed from the antique, they still could not fail to retain a character and strongly-marked national stamp. But neither Italy nor Western Europe produced another Dante, and he was and remained the man who first thrust antiquity into the foreground of national culture In the ‘Divine Comedy’ he treats the ancient and the Christian worlds, not indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one another” (Burckhardt 121).

In describing renaissance humanism and the development of the ideal individual, credit is also due to Dante.

“When this impulse to the highest individual development was combined with a powerful and varied nature, which had mastered all the elements of the culture of the age, then arose the ‘all sided man’--‘l’uomo universale’--who belonged to Italy alone...Dante, who even in his lifetime, was called by some a poet, by others a philosopher, by others a theologian, pours forth in all his writings a stream of personal force by which the reader, apart from the interest of the subject, feels himself carried away...For the visual arts he is of the first importance, he soon became himself the source of inspiration….Dante does not for a moment fail to insist on the moral responsibility of man; he believes in free will….‘The stars,’ he makes his Marco Lombardo say, ‘the stars give the first impulse to your actions, but a light is given to you to know good and evil, and free will, which, if it endure the strain in its first battlings with the heavens, at length gains the whole victory, if it be well nurtured” (Burckhardt 84, 308).

The impact which Burckhardt believes Dante has had on the development of the renaissance cannot be understated. In Civilization the figure of Dante towers over his contemporaries; men as famous as Lorenzo De’ Medici and Petrarch still cannot measure up to Burckhardt’s Dante. In a sense, Dante, for Burckhardt, represents the spirit of the renaissance embodied in a single man. He is more than human, more than genius--the dante of Civilization is a transcendent figure as constitutive of the renaissance episteme as he is representative of it. It is impossible to separate Dante from the emergence of humanistic individualism or from the revival of antiquarian artistic forms and philosophy, two of the most significant developments of the era. 

 

The dramatic importance that Burckhardt places on Dante immediately draws comparison to Nietzsche’s depiction of the transhistorical man, a figure who is able to adopt the elements of past cultures which are most beneficial but discard the proverbial chaff, and so avoid being subsumed by an abundance of history and lapse into quietism or apathy. 

“It depends on one’s being able to forget at the right time as well as to remember at the right time; on discerning with strong instinctual feelings when there is a need to experience historically and when unhistorically. Precisely this is the proposition the reader is invited to consider. The unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people, and a culture” (Nietzche 10).

It is exactly this process of discernment which runs through Burckhardt’s description of Dante as the herald of antiquity. Dante did not simply mimic the epic poetic forms of the hellenistic writers, nor the political polemic of Aristotle. His Divine Comedy reveals an innate, Nietzschean ability to sense what artistic forms of antiquity were of value and those which were not. The result far exceeds imitation; it is more than the works of the ancients and something greater than the medieval poetry of Dante’s contemporaries--the result, as Burckhardt describes the Comedy, is transcendent genius. It is this rare ability which men like Dante possess which allows them to become so immensely influential. In the framework of Burckhardt’s aesthetic conception of civilization, transhistorical men like Dante are the primary force of historical development; it is their irreplicable achievements which can permanently alter the form and direction of the artistic discourse--be it statesmanship, verse, or the fine arts. 

​

Dante is Burckhardt’s truly ideal great renaissance man, but he is not the only such figure in Civilization. A similar role is occupied by the humanists, a specific class of artistically and scholarly inclined gentry. Following in Dante’s footsteps (but not imitating), these men strove to produce works of art that were consciously informed by antiquity and, as the name humanists suggests, were largely concerned with the experience of the specific individual as opposed to the collectivist tendencies of the earlier middle ages. These great men, and by extension, the age of the renaissance as a whole, were able to achieve such heights because of their new found individualist spirit.

“In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness--that which was turned within as that which was turned without--lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession...man was conscious of himself only as am member of a race, people, party, family or corporation..in Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the State and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such” (Burckhardt 81).

The men who most strongly possessed this sense of being, with the exception of Dante, were the humanists. They placed the self upon an altar and pursued knowledge and their passions at risk of life and limb, so strong was their impulse. 

“Who now were those who acted as mediators between their own age and a venerated antiquity, and made the latter a chief element in the culture of the former? They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing one face today and another tomorrow; but they clearly felt themselves, and it was fully recognized by their time that they formed a wholly new element in society...the position of the humanist was almost incompatible with a fixed home, since it either made frequent changes of dwelling necessary for a livelihood, or so affected the mind of the individual that he could never be happy in one place. He grew tired of the people, and had no peace among the enmities which he excited...this life reminds us of the Greek sophists of the Empire...add to this the deadening effects of licentious excess and, since do what he might--the worst was believed of him--a total indifference to the moral laws recognized by others. Such men can hardly be conceived to exist without an inordinate pride. They are the most striking examples of an unbridled subjectivity” (Burckhardt 120, 165).

In few other passages of Civilization is the depiction of an ideal Nietzschean individual so clear.  The humanists, like Dante, are inheritors of antiquity, but, unlike the moderns whom Nietzsche describes in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, are not epigones. And, like Nietzsche’s great men, the humanists are misunderstood by society. They live on the fringes of a culture, marginalized by the lesser citizens who cannot comprehend their all consuming desires. The humanists have also transcended the need for common morality; their ability to internally reflect and use history for life reveals the historical absurdity of christian moral codes, which weaken man.  The condition that Nietzsche claims so plagues modern man, namely, “the remarkable opposition of an inside to which no outside and an outside to which no inside corresponds, an opposition unknown to ancient peoples,” does not trouble the renaissance humanist (Nietzche 24). The newly developed spirit of the renaissance that Burckhardt describes--simultaneously subjective and objective--is fully realized in this class of humanists who are able to think both spiritually and empirically. There is no contradiction in this state, the sign of a great man is the ability to unify the fractured internal self.

​

As it can best be summarized Burckhardt’s theory of history (what elements of a society grant it its unique character, and what factors drive its development or failure) is dependent upon the interplay between these Nietzschean great men and the highly aestheticized society within which they move. Burckhardt conceives of the superstructural elements of a society as, essentially, artistic genres. Their internal logic functions in a similar manner. Influential masters like Dante can shift the direction of a whole “movement”, and interplay and overlap between the artistic modes of civilization (the art of ruling, the art of home making, the art of economics, etc) produces further developments, with the goal of perfection in mind. However, Burckhardt’s largely Nietzschean depiction of the individual introduces a tension to the text. Namely, that Burckhardt, unlike Nietzsche, has not discarded traditional Christian morality. His depictions of men like Dante and the humanists wavers constantly between admiration for the products that their unbridled individualism produced and abhorrent condemnation of the violence and immorality that this same unrestrained individualist spirit produced. This tension is most visible in Burckhardt’s descriptions of the princes of the Italian city states, who, despite the tremendous violence they wrought, were “uomini universali” themselves, as well as great patrons of the arts. For Burckhardt, the epitome of such men was Sigismondo Malatesta.

“Unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high culture have been seldom combined in one individual as in sigismondo Malatesta. But the accumulated crimes of such a family must at last outweigh all talent, however great, and drag the tyrant into the abyss….he [Malatesta] had a number of scholars around him, some of whom he provided for liberally, even giving them landed estates...when the humanists themselves came to die, they were lain in or under the sarcophagi with which the niches of the outside walls of the church were adorned...it is hard for us nowadays to believe that such a monster like this prince felt learning and friendship of cultivated people to be a necessity of life; and yet the man who excommunicated him, made war upon him, and burnt him in effigy, Pope Pius II, says: ‘Sigismondo knew history and had a great store of philosophy; he seemed born to all that he undertook.’”

Burckhardt’s personal judgements can be felt most strongly in passages such as this. He is divided, stricken even, by his mutually incompatible admiration for the incredible achievements that renaissance men of power could achieve and his simultaneous moral repulsion at their abject immorality. How could a man such as Sigismondo, who was accused of torture, poisonings, incest, and heresy also be literate in five languages and spend vast sums of his fortune patronizing the arts? Burckhardt is unable to overcome his self division on this manner, and his recourse is to retreat into vaguely Christian moralizing. Thus, Sigismondo, despite his positive personal qualities, must inevitably fall due to the weight of his sins. This same line of logic is extended to the humanists as well. 

“The career of the humanists was, as a rule, of such a kind that only the strongest characters could pass through it unscathed….for an ambitious youth, the fame and the brilliant position of the humanists were a perilous temptation; it seemed to him that he too ‘through an inborn pride could no longer regard the low and common things of life.’ He was thus led to plunge into a life of vicissitude, in which exhausting studies, tutorships, secretaryships, professorships, offices in princely households, moral enmities and perils, luxury and beggary, boundless admiration and boundless contempt followed confusedly upon the other” (Burckhardt 164).

The humanists, unlike the great princes, fell due to hubris and the inherent instability of their class; however, Burckhardt is still issuing a moral admonishment. Sigismondo and the humanists, both examples of the great Nietzschean man, are ultimately condemned by Burckhardt despite his recognition of their genius. The implications of this critique seriously damage the theoretical integrity of Burckhardt’s theory of history. For, if, as Burckhardt insists, it is the transcendent individual figure who is the the source of the telos of history then these men cannot be restrained by the petty morals of their inferiors. To be truly transcendent and use history for life to its fullest extent, the transhistorical man cannot be bound by the historically specific morality of a specific era. Certainly not Burckhardt’s anachronistic moralizing. What Burckhardt sees as a crisis--the difficulty of reconciling the artistic genius of great men with their immorality--is actually no crisis at all. For these central aspects of their being stem from the same source. The wellspring of the genius which inspired the artistic achievements of men such as Dante also instilled amorality in the humanists--by necessity, almost. The ability to use history for life separates one from the rest of society because it reveals the falsity and constructed nature of a large number of closely cherished beliefs. It is this same sensibility which meant that Dante and the humanists did not uncritically adopt the practices of antiquity. They judged what artistic forms were worthy to be upheld and which were not. Morality was subjected to the same process. Burckhardt cannot advocate a theory of history which posits the aesthetic works of great men as the telos of history if he is unable to fully accept that source of said telos will inevitably erode Christian morality. Burckhardt’s crisis restrains the dynamic nature of his vision of history; the perfection of the aesthetic sphere cannot be achieved if great men will ultimately fall due to their perceived moral failings.

 

Burckhardt certainly emphasizes the importance of the transhistorical individual as the driving force behind his teleology but, unlike Nietzsche, he does not believe that these individuals are essentially engaged in a struggle against a largely unenlightened society. Men like Dante and the humanists faced isolation and estrangement but Burckhardt’s vision of the civilization as a whole does not separate the enlightened “uomini universali” from the greater body of their nation. This lies in opposition to Nietzsche’s depiction of great men, whom he claims will forever be subject to misinterpretation, misguided worship, rejection, and abuse from the ignorant masses. For Nietzsche, the only solace such men can take is in their connection, across time, to others of their standing (Nietzche 16, 43). Burckhardt takes no such stance; individuals like Dante may possess tremendous genius and insight but their accomplishments function as part of the larger development of the artistic, human spirit.

“To the discovery of the outward world the Renaissance added a still greater achievement, by first discerning and bringing to light the full, whole nature of man. This period, as we have seen, first gave the highest development to individuality, and then led the individual to the most zealous and thorough study of himself in all forms and under all conditions. Indeed, the development of personality is essentially involved in the recognition of it in oneself and in others. Between these two great processes or narrative has placed the influence of ancient literature because the mode of conceiving and representing both the individual and human nature in general was defined and colored by that influence. But the power of conception and representation lay in the age and the people” (Burckhardt 184-185).

Burckhardt’s development of the human spirit should not be confused with his more cause-effect based conception of historical development. The achievements of great men are certainly one of the driving forces of history, but the growth of spirit occurs at a level of abstraction higher than the processes by which Dante and the humanists reintroduced antiquity to Italian society. This spiritual development occurs across the whole of a society, unfolding in a pseudo-Hegelian manner. The Hegelian comparison can only be extended so far, however, because unlike Hegel Burckhardt’s conception of this spirit is an organicist one which is bound to a nation/people.

 

It is this more fully developed italian national character which Buckhardt credits as the impetus for a wide variety of renaissance era achievements.

“From time immemorial the Mediterranean Sea had given to the nations that dwelt on its shores mental impulses different from those which governed the peoples of the North...Columbus himself is but the greatest of a long list of Italians who, in the service of the western nations, sailed into distant seas. The true discoverer, however, is not the man who first changes to stumble upon anything, but the man who finds what he has sought. Su9ch one alone stands in a link with the thoughts and interests of his predecessors, and this relationship will also determine the account he gives of his search. For which reason the Italians, although their claims to be the first comers on this or that shore may be disputed, will yet retain their title to be pre-eminently the nation of discoverers” (Burckhardt 171-172).

This form of explanation immediately draws comparison to a genealogy of German historo-philosophical organicism that, in its most prominent form as espoused by Oswald Spengler, posits certain innate national characteristics which link a people to their racial-geographic place of origin. In Spengler’s elaboration different civilizations are naturally predisposed to certain achievements and will be weaker or less advanced in other areas. Burckhardt depicts Italian dominance during the Age of Exploration as an almost inevitable consequence; it was the logical result of a people who fostered individualism, artistic spirit, and lived near the mediterranean, which inspired dreams of conquest and adventure across generations. Burckhardt extends the logic of this explanation to the myriad of artistic forms which reached their zenith during renaissance society. Perhaps most significantly, the sense of developed individualism which he emphasizes as central to the achievements of the renaissance is also a uniquely Italian characteristic (Burckhardt 186-195). 

​

Burckhardt’s understanding of history is informed by three separate but not distinct theoretical concepts. The foundational principle is his vision of society as an essentially artistic construction. Inter-state relations, the act of ruling, the rules of high society, indeed, even organization of modes of production are all envisioned as artistic discourses. This conception allows Burckhardt to people these various artistic “movements” of society with great men, who, like the great masters of painting, possess extraordinary influence over the development of their respective fields. Most central to Civilization are Dante and the humanists, who collectively are responsible for some of the largest developments of the renaissance: the rise of humanistic individualism and the resurgence of antiquity, most significantly. These figures take on a Nietzschean stature in Burckhardt’s text; they seem to loom larger than life, transcending historical barriers as well as the limitations that society and others place upon them. Reveling in the unbridled individualism of the era--in a sense their own creation--Dante and the humanists pursued the artistic ideal beholden to none and left a tremendous influence on the renaissance as a whole. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Burckhardt does not believe that these great men existed on a level totally abstracted from the rest of society. Nietzsche believed that, perhaps, the last great era was Greek antiquity because the whole of society adopted a similar apollonian mindset which allowed even the lowest classes to achieve a degree of the ideal human condition. Burckhardt is not nearly as cynical; men like Dante certainly excelled beyond their peers, but their achievements were integral to the development of the society as a whole. Specifically, the unfolding of the unique humanistic spirit of the Italian renaissance which encompassed the whole of society. There are two levels of historical teleology, then. The more local (but still quite broad) level, in which the primary telos is the extraordinary deeds and works of transhistorical men acting within the discourse of the artistic society. Then, at the grander level, the gradual development of the artistic spirit as a whole. This development is influenced by the lesser scale but its rate of growth is far slower and its deployment rage far wider. This development occurs on the scale of the gradual understanding of the beauty and potential of the inward self and outward world which was to slowly emerge from the obfuscating period of the Middle Ages. Hayden White’s application of his emplotment theory to Burckhardt perhaps captures the essence of this historiography best. 

“These affinities are not to be taken as necessary combinations of the modes in a given historian. On the contrary, the dialectical tension which characterizes the work of every master historian usually arises from an effort to wed a mode of emplotment with a mode of argument or of ideological implication which is consonant with it….so, too, Burckhardt used a Satirical emplotment and a Contextualist argument in the service of an ideological position that is explicitly Conservative and ultimately Reactionary” (White 30).

The reactionary/conservative tendency in Burckhardt is easy to see, it comes through clearly in his aestheticization of society, and in his total disregard for class and gender based oppression in the face of what Buckhardt believes to be an overriding unity of national spirit. However, as previously described, the driving force behind the development of this spirit stems in large part from the pseudo-Nietzschean liberated individual. However, Burckhardt is unable to fully embrace these figures because of their perceived immorality. The satirical emplotment is most distinct in Burckhardt’s troubled depictions of the despots of the renaissance, which border on humorous in their descriptions of schizoid vacillations between acts of pure selflessness and utter depravity. The textual conflict which I have previously highlighted--Burckhardt's difficulty in accepting that the source of the immorality which he rejects is also the source of artistic genius--is exactly what White refers to here in his description of dialectical tension. Burckhardt’s work is masterful but he is unable to overcome the contradiction between his conservative, moralistic lens of analysis and the far more radical, Nietzschean vein of historiography which casts aside morality and society in pursuit of the artistic ideal and perfection of the self.