Jacob Burckhardt

Jacob Burckhardt
Jacob Burckhardt in 1892
Born	(1818-05-25)May 25, 1818 Basel, Switzerland
Died	August 8, 1897(1897-08-08) (aged 79) Basel, Switzerland
Nationality	Swiss
Occupation	Historian

Jacob Burckhardt on the eighth series of the Swiss banknotes.

Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (May 25, 1818 – August 8, 1897) was a historian of art and culture, and an influential figure in the historiography of both these fields. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history. Siegfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "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." Burckhardt's best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

Life

The son of a Protestant clergyman, Burckhardt was born and died in Basel, where he studied theology in the hope of taking holy orders; however, under the influence of Wilhelm De Wette he chose not to become a clergyman. He finished his degree in 1839 and went to the University of Berlin to study history, especially art history, then a new field. At Berlin, he attended lectures by Leopold von Ranke, the founder of history as a respectable academic discipline based on sources and records rather than personal opinions. He spent part of 1841 at the University of Bonn, studying under the art historian Franz Kugler, to whom he dedicated his first book, Die Kunstwerke der belgischen Städte (1842). He taught at the University of Basel from 1843 to 1855, then at the engineering school ETH Zurich. In 1858, he returned to Basel to assume the professorship he held until his 1893 retirement. Only starting in 1886 did he teach art history exclusively. He twice declined offers of professorial chairs at German universities, at the University of Tübingen in 1867, and Ranke's chair at the University of Berlin in 1872.

See Life by Hans Trog in the Basler Jahrbuch for 1898, pp. 1–172.

Burckhardt is currently featured on the Swiss thousand franc banknote.

Work

Burckhardt's historical writings did much to establish the importance of art in the study of history; indeed, he was one of the "founding fathers of art history" but also one of the original creators of cultural history. According to John Lukacs, he was the first master of cultural history, which seeks to describe the spirit and the forms of expression of a particular age, a particular people, or a particular place. His innovative approach to historical research stressed the importance of art and its inestimable value as a primary source for the study of history. He was one of the first historians to rise above the narrow nineteenth-century notion that "history is past politics and politics current history." Burckhardt's unsystematic approach to history was strongly opposed to the interpretations of Hegelianism, which was popular at the time; economism as an interpretation of history; and positivism, which had come to dominate scientific discourses (including the discourse of the social sciences).

In 1838. Burckhardt made his first journey to Italy and published his first important article, "Bemerkungen über schweizerische Kathedralen" ("Remarks about Swiss Cathedrals"). Burckhardt delivered a series of lectures at the University of Basel, which were published in 1943 by Pantheon Books Inc. under the title Force and Freedom: An Interpretation of History by Jacob Burckhardt. In 1847 he brought out new editions of Kugler's two great works, Geschichte der Malerei and Kunstgeschichte, and in 1853 published his own work, Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen ("The Age of Constantine the Great"). He spent the greater part of the years 1853–1854 in Italy, collecting materials for his 1855 Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (7th German edition, 1899), also dedicated to Kugler. This work, "the finest travel guide that has ever been written" which covered sculpture and architecture, as well as painting, became an indispensable guide to the art traveller in Italy.

About half of the original edition was devoted to the art of the Renaissance. Thus Burckhardt was naturally led to write the two books for which he is best known, his 1860 Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien ("The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy") (English translation, by S. G. C. Middlemore, in 2 vols., London, 1878), and his 1867 Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien ("The History of the Renaissance in Italy"). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance in the nineteenth century and is still widely read. While quite controversial, its scholarly judgements are sometimes considered to be justified by subsequent research according to historians including Desmond Seward and art historians notably Kenneth Clark. Burckhardt and the German historian Georg Voigt founded the historical study of the Renaissance. In contrast to Voigt, who confined his studies to early Italian humanism, Burckhardt dealt with all aspects of Renaissance society.

Burckhardt considered the study of ancient history an intellectual necessity and was a highly respected scholar of Greek civilization. "The Greeks and Greek Civilization" sums up the relevant lectures, "Griechische Kulturgeschichte", which Burckhardt first gave in 1872 and which he repeated until 1885. At his death, he was working on a four-volume survey of Greek civilization.

Friedrich Nietzsche, appointed professor of classical philology at Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, admired Burckhardt and attended some of his lectures. Both men were admirers of the late Arthur Schopenhauer. Nietzsche believed Burckhardt agreed with the thesis of his The Birth of Tragedy, namely that Greek culture was defined by opposing "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" tendencies. Nietzsche and Burckhardt enjoyed each other's intellectual company, even as Burckhardt kept his distance from Nietzsche's evolving philosophy. Their extensive correspondence over a number of years has been published. Burckhardt's student Heinrich Wölfflin succeeded him at the University of Basel at the age of only twenty-eight.

Politics

There is a tension in Burckhardt's persona between the wise and worldly student of the Italian Renaissance, and the cautious product of Swiss Calvinism, which he had studied extensively for the ministry. The Swiss polity in which he spent nearly all of his life was a good deal more democratic and stable than was the norm in nineteenth century Europe. As a Swiss, Burckhardt was also cool to German nationalism and to German claims of cultural and intellectual superiority. He was also amply aware of the rapid political and economic changes taking place in the Europe of his day, commenting in his lectures and writings on the Industrial Revolution, the European political upheavals of his day, and the growing European nationalism and militarism. Events amply fulfilled his prediction of a cataclysmic twentieth century, in which violent demagogues (whom he called "terrible simplifiers") would play central roles. In later years, Burckhardt found himself unimpressed by democracy, individualism, socialism and a great many other ideas which were fashionable during his lifetime.

He also observed over a century ago, “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.”

References and sources

References

Primary sources

• 1878. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The Middlemore translation of the 1860 German original.
• 1990. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Penguin Classics. ISBN 0-14-044534-X
• 1999. The Greeks and Greek Civilization, Oswyn Murray, ed. New York: St Martin's Griffin. ISBN 0-312-24447-9

Liberty Fund reprints:

• 1929. Judgements on History and Historians. Translated by Harry Zohn. Foreword by Alberto Coll.
• The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt. Selected, edited, and translated by Alexander Dru. Foreword by Alberto Coll, ISBN 0-86597-122-6.
• 1943. Reflections on History. Introduction by Gottfried Dietze, ISBN 0-913966-37-1.

Further reading

• Gilbert, Felix (1990). History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. p. 109. ISBN 0-691-03163-0.
• Gossman, Lionel, 2000. Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas. The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-30500-7
• Grosse, Jurgen, 1999, "Reading History: On Jacob Burckhardt as Source-Reader," Journal of the History of Ideas 60: 525-47.
• Gossman, Lionel. "Jacob Burckhardt: Cold War Liberal?" Journal of Modern History (2002) 74#3 pp. 538–572 in JSTOR
• Hinde, John R., 2000. Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-1027-3
• Howard, Thomas Albert, 1999. Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. De Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65022-4
• Mommsen, Wolfgang. "Jacob Burckhardt- Defender of Culture and Prophet of Doom," Government and Opposition (1983) 18#4 pp. 458–475.
• Rüsen, Jörn. "Jacob Burckhardt: Political Standpoint and Historical Insight on the Border of Postmodernism," History and Theory (1985) 24#3 pp. 235–246
• Sigurdson, Richard, 2004. Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought. Univ. of Toronto Press. ISBN 0802047807

External links

• Publications by and about Jacob Burckhardt in the catalogue Helveticat of the Swiss National Library
• Works by Jacob Burckhardt at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Jacob Burckhardt at the Internet Archive
• Works by Jacob Burckhardt at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Jakob Burckhardt Renaissance - Cultural history.
• A Brief Biography.
• Complete German text of The Greeks and Greek Civilization ("Griechische Kulturgeschichte")
• Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians (1929) at The Online Library of Liberty
• Jacob Burckhardt: Historian Of Civilization essay on the life and works of Jacob Burckhardt by Olivier Burckhardt, Contemporary Review, November 1997, Vol. 271, Issue 1582, pp. 250–256
• Jacob Burckhardt at arthistoricum.net