Modernity is a Predicament: On Jacob Burckhardt and the Italian Renaissance
- Daniel Woolf
- Sep 28
- 9 min read
Daniel Woolf on A Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy Reconsidered
History is a peculiar discipline. It has long prided itself on its rules and canons, yet some of the most memorable and (sometimes) influential historians have been mavericks whose works did not conform to established practices. Consider Edward Gibbon, whose learning, on display in thick footnotes, was deep and wit sharp, but whose oft-contrarian Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire infuriated eighteenth-century churchmen; or the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, whose brilliant Autumntide of the Middle Ages is a plotless masterpiece on late medieval cultural history, authored over a hundred years ago, yet is still in print.
Huizinga in particular owed a debt to a Swiss historian born a century earlier, Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897). Born in Basel, Burckhardt studied in Berlin with the iconic lawgiver of the nineteenth-century historical discipline, Leopold von Ranke before returning to his hometown to teach at the University of Basel. He spent the rest of his life there. Unlike Ranke (a prolific writer whose disciples dominated the profession through the nineteenth century), Burckhardt had few pupils--his Basel successor Heinrich Wölfflin being a notable and important exception, and his younger colleague, Friedrich Nietzsche, an informal protégé. Burckhardt also published far less than many of his contemporaries and elders, Ranke included. But Ranke is infrequently read today while Burckhardt, like Huizinga, is not only still read today (albeit rarely in entirety) but continues to exert a Black Hole-like gravitational force on scholarship about the Italian Renaissance. One of Burckhardt’s successors at Basel, Werner Kaegi (1901-79) would spend most of his career writing a seven-volume biography of his great predecessor. Herman Hesse modeled Father Jacobus, the mentor-historian in his 1943 book, The Glass Bead Game on Burckhardt. From 1998 to 2019 Burckhardt’s image adorned the Swiss 1000-franc banknote. And in 2018 the British Academy held a symposium to mark the bicentennial of his birth, a gathering that has, after a few years delay, resulted in the book under review, edited by Stefan Bauer and Simon Ditchfield.
Collections of essays are often a mixed bag with chapters of uneven quality that wander far from the book’s stated theme. That’s not true in this case—the volume is uniformly excellent and, atypically for such works, well cross-referenced between essays. Collectively the chapters are focused not on Burckhardt’s life or even his broader oeuvre but on his most important and impactful work, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, first published in 1860. This is better known under the title of its first (and so far only) full English translation, published in 1890 by the Victorian S.G.C. Middlemore as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (hereafter CRI). A recurrent theme of the essays is that while Middlemore’s translation, especially in the illustrated edition that first appeared in 1958, remains highly readable and mainly faithful, a modern rendition of this Burckhardt’s classic would be a boon. In a subtle essay on the “colours” of antiquity in CRI (especially its third section, devoted to “the revival of antiquity,” Barbara von Reinitz notes that Burckhardt’s prioritizing of Rome over Greece as the more durable vessel of ancient culture is lost in Middlemore’s translation of “das römisch-griechische Altertum” as “the civilization of Greece and Rome.” Most of Burckhardt’s copious footnotes have been progressively cut from subsequent abridgments of Middlemore’s version, such as that published by Penguin Books in 1990. However, as Mikkel Mangold suggests in his opening chapter, even the German editions published to date are imperfect, not least because CRI was a book about the Renaissance with remarkably little about a keystone of the period’s culture: actual works of art, a topic that certainly interested Burckhardt and which he had written about in an earlier traveller’s guide to Italian painting, the Cicerone.
Burckhardt came neither to praise nor bury the Renaissance: his attitude to that era was ambivalent and his book is far from uniformly laudatory. He adopted from the early humanists he portrayed in CRI a fixation on antiquity and its values. Against the mid-nineteenth century optimistic Zeitgeist, insofar as he saw “progress” as a consequence of the Renaissance, it was less a feature than a bug. Burckhardt, who grew increasingly reactionary as he aged, disliked the modernity of his own era (an outlook he shared with Nietzsche): modernity was, note the editors of the volume under review, “a predicament, not an achievement.” A century and a half later, both Burckhardt and Nietzsche have plenty of fellow-travellers in hostility to the modern, an attitude which has taken various forms including the “reactionary anti-modernism” which historian Jeffrey Herf has attributed to totalitarian regimes from Hitler to Saddam Hussein, or the traditionalism of inter-war authors such as G.K. Chesterton and the Italian Julius Evola whose 1934 tome Revolt Against the Modern was a key text of Italian Fascism. And then of course there are the more leftward-leaning critiques of the modern that are somewhat lazily grouped as “post-modern,” not to mention, more recently, “meta-modernism” and the politically ambiguous “anarcho-primitivism.”
It would be a stretch to impute any of these more extreme positions to Burckhardt whose distaste for modernity sprang from, rather than revolted against, humanist and Enlightened roots, and, unlike Herf’s reactionary anti-modernists, he did not disparage post-Renaissance values while hypocritcally genuflecting at the altar of technological progress. Moreover, it is also the case that Burckhardt did not see himself as an antiquarian and bridled at Nietzsche’s reference to him as an example of the “antiquarian” mode of historiography in the latter’s Untimely Meditations. Burckhardt, as Martin A. Ruehl comments, saw the anecdotes, minor details and digressions in his work as essential pieces illustrative of Renaissance culture, not as arcane trivia preserved for the sake of being preserved. On the one hand, Burckhardt did not think the Renaissance ancient enough: William Stenhouse’s essay points out that Burckhardt found many Renaissance adaptations of ancient genres jejune or artificial, and that he was more impressed when the humanist writers adapted rather than tried to imitate their classical models. On the other hand, Burckhardt singled out for praise fifteenth-century figures such as Flavio Biondo and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola who were able to break away from slavish mimicry. These two positions seem somewhat contradictory, which perhaps illustrates again the ambivalence that suffuses CRI. Renaissance odes were fulsome and verbose, while letter-writing reached praiseworthy high standards of “pure” Latinity. Yet the real stars were the vernacular writers who borrowed from Rome but shaped the Italian language by choosing to write in the volgare.
CRI is an unusual book for the nineteenth century, which loved grand sweeping nationalist narratives. It lacks a plot or even a narrative structure, something that irked one of his early critics, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, for whom (as recounted by Ruehl) the lack of chronology and causal relationships signified “the total dissolution of history.” Burckhardt organized his material topically rather than chronologically under section titles that have themselves become quotable phrases, such as “The State as a Work of Art,” “The Development of the Individual,” “The Revival of Antiquity,” “The Discovery of the World and of Man,” “Society and Festivals,” and “Morality and Religion.” Burckhardt rarely if ever used archival sources in an era that fetishized the manuscript, preferring printed books, and his research method typically involved writing notes on slips of paper, then reassembling them topically—a literal example of R.G. Collingwood’s “scissors and paste” history.
A Renaissance Reclaimed is similarly topically organized (presumably minus the slips of paper), with its several sections each aligned to the chapters of CRI that they address. (The exceptions include a two chapter “Prologue: the Making of a Text” consisting of Mangold’s aforementioned essay and Martin A. Ruehl’s overview of Burckhardt as a cultural historian.) Bauer and Ditchfield provide an extensive introduction to their volume, one far more than a mere summary of their contributors’ chapters, announcing the intention of the book to “review Burckhardt’s historical thought in all its complexity.” This the book does, but much more as several chapters range beyond CRI itself to explore its subsequent influence on Renaissance studies in particular and historiography in general. Robert Black’s chapter is the sole entry under “The State as a Work of Art,” and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly similarly the lone chapter in the section on “Society and Festivals.” All other sections have two chapters each, beginning with “The Development of the Individual,” which includes chapters from Virginia Cox on “The Performance of Identity in Renaissance Italy” and Wietse de Boer on “Expressions of the Self. The ensuing section, on Burckhardt’s “Revival of Antiquity,” features von Reibnitz’s essay and Stenhouse on Burckhardt’s treatment of humanism’s antiquarian tendencies. “The Discovery of the World and of Man,” the widest ranging section of the book, is handled by Joan-Pau Rubiés and Giuseppe Marcocci: the former taking a “cosmopolitan perspective” on that section of CRI in the context of nineteenth-century imperial expansion, the latter situating it as a prototype of modern global history-writing. The final complete section, on “Morality and Religion” includes co-editor Bauer’s individual offering on Burckhardt and “the principle of correction” and Nicholas Terpstra’s erudite (and wonderfully witty) piece on Burckhardt’s personal beliefs as they related to Renaissance religion.
Several recurrent issues straddle the chapters and weave them together: Burckhardt’s conservatism and elitism, for instance, and the question, perhaps a little more “inside baseball” for many readers, of the degree to which he was or was not a “Hegelian.” The late art historian E.H. Gombrich saw Burckhardt as at least a crypto-Hegelian since the author of CRI (despite denouncing Hegel in another work, The Study of History), did adopt the notion of a guiding “Geist” or Spirit of the Age. Ruehl disagrees with Gombrich, seeing the denunciations as sincere and Burckhardt’s Geist far from the all-seeing, powerful engine of Hegelian history. Further on, de Boer takes a more nuanced view of Burckhardt’s debt to Hegel and to Hegel-adjacent thinkers (such as another of Burckhardt’s mentors, J.G. Droysen), noting that it was principally the teleological and a priori aspects of Hegel that he disliked.
Burckhardt had other dislikes. As von Reibnitz observes, he wasn’t especially fond of the notion of “Renaissance,” and especially of the notion that its most important aspect was the revival of antiquity, which he saw more as a reagent generating the era’s energy than as an essential part of its content. In his early chapter tracing the evolution of Renaissance “stato” into something like the modern sense of “state,” Black reminds us that the “work of art” that was Burckhardt’s state included some highly violent and cruel figures such as the successive rulers of Milan, the Visconti and Sforza, several of whom feature in CRI: Giovanni Maria Visconti, Burckhardt tells us, was “famed for his dogs, which were no longer, however, used for hunting, but for tearing human bodies.” Not for nothing do several subsections of that chapter of Burckhardt have the word “tyrannies” in their titles. Although his language is often flatly factual, Burckhardt (unlike the more charitable Huizinga half a century later), seems also to have disliked a good many of the individuals about whom he wrote, and even the “individualism” which, in its excess, he saw as a fundamental, if historically conditioned, flaw in the Italian character. This emerges in several sections of CRI, but perhaps nowhere more obviously than in its final, and longest section on religion and morality. As Terpstra comments, the “morality” of Burckhardt’s Renaissance Italy was really immorality, and if the earlier sections of CRI provide a mixture of praise and blame, its concluding pages suggest “that the fun is over and the Sunday School lesson will now begin.” And the blind spots in CRI have become much more obvious in a contemporary context of anti-Eurocentrism and globalism; Burckhardt’s Renaissance was purely European and, as its title accurately suggests, Italocentric—he paid little attention to the northern Renaissance later celebrated by Huizinga other than as a recipient of southern European culture, and was also dismissive, as Marcocci notes, of accounts of the new world by Iberian authors, those enormously influential histories and treatises that laid the foundations for four centuries of colonization.
Collectively, A Renaissance Reclaimed provides a balanced and comprehensive overview of the components of Jacob Burckhardt’s magnum opus, which explains why CRI remains, over a century and a half later, an important and innovative landmark in the history of historiography. What is lost in the collection by lack of a single authorial voice such as Burckhardt’s own is more than made up for by the complementary team of scholars providing readers a learned but accessible Cicerone through the scenes and anecdotes that Basel’s most notable nineteenth-century citizen bequeathed, in CRI, to posterity—Burckhardt’s gift to a modernity that he himself would not have enjoyed. One wonders if he might have taken solace in the late Bruno Latour’s suggestion that “we have never been modern.” Somehow, I doubt it.
Daniel Woolf’s research has focused on two areas, early modern British intellectual and cultural history, and the global history and theory of historical writing. He is the author of five books and co-editor of several others, including the two-volume A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (2 vols 1998). His 2003 monograph, The Social Circulation of the Past, won the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies in 2004 for the best book on British history pre-1800. His most recent books include A Concise History of History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and History from Loss: a Global Introduction to Histories Written from Defeat, Colonization, Exile, and Imprisonment (co-edited with Marnie Hughes-Warrington; Routledge, 2023). He is a contributing editor for Marginalia Review of Books, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Past and Present, The American Historical Review, History and Theory, Renaissance Quarterly, and The Journal of the History of Ideas. He is series editor of Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Historical Theory and Practice.
