Jacob Burckhardt in 1892

Jacob Burckhardt (May 25, 1818, Basel, Switzerland – August 8, 1897, Basel) was a Swiss historian of art and culture, and an influential figure in the historiography of each field. Events 1085 - Alfonso VI of Castile takes Toledo Spain back from the Moors. Year 1818 ( MDCCCXVIII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Common "Basilia" redirects here For the Fly Genus, see Basilia (fly. Switzerland (English pronunciation; Schweiz Swiss German: Schwyz or Schwiiz Suisse Svizzera Svizra officially the Swiss Confederation Events 1220 - Sweden is defeated by Estonian tribes in the Battle of Lihula. Year 1897 ( MDCCCXCVII) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Common Switzerland (English pronunciation; Schweiz Swiss German: Schwyz or Schwiiz Suisse Svizzera Svizra officially the Swiss Confederation See also History An historian is an individual who studies and writes about History, and is regarded as an Authority on it Art history is the Academic study of objects of Art in their Historical development and stylistic contexts i The term cultural history (from the German term) refers both to an Academic discipline and to its subject matter 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. Sigfried Giedion ( 14 April 1888, Prague &ndash 10 April 1968, Zürich) (also spelled Siegfried Giedion) was The Renaissance (from French Renaissance, meaning "rebirth" Italian: Rinascimento, from re- "again" and nascere "^[1] Burckhardt's best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy ( Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien) is an 1860 work on the Italian Renaissance by Swiss historian

Life

The son of a Protestant clergyman, Burckhardt studied theology in Basel and in Neuchâtel until 1839 after losing his faith; he moved to the University of Berlin to study history, especially art history, then a new field. Neuchâtel ( literally: New Castle in Old French) is the Capital of the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel on Lake 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 his own opinions. Leopold von Ranke ( December 21, 1795 – May 23, 1886) was a German Historian of the 19th century and frequently considered 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). The University of Bonn ( German: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, Germany Franz Kugler is the name of several people Franz Theodor Kugler, (1808 - 1858 German art historian and poet He taught at the University of Basel from 1843 to 1855, then at ETH, the engineering school in Zurich. Zürich (, Zürich German: Züri, Zurich, Zurigo; in English generally Zurich) is the largest city in Switzerland and capital of the 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. Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen ( German: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, sometimes called the "Eberhardina Carolina" is a public university

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

Work

Jacob Burckhardt on a Swiss one thousand franc banknote

Burckhardt's historical writings did much to establish art history as an academic discipline, and also have literary value in their own right. His innovative approach to historical research emphasized the value of art, culture and aesthetic representation when analyzing the social and political trends underlying particular historical epochs. His approach to the study of history emphasized art, culture and the aesthetic/social existence of the people in a given period; as a historian he 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). Hegelianism is a Philosophy developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel which can be summed up by Hegel's "the Rational alone is real" which means Economism is a term used to criticize Economic Reductionism, that is the reduction of all Social facts to economical dimensions Positivism is the Philosophy that the only authentic knowledge is knowledge that is based on actual sense experience

In 1838 he made his first journey to Italy, and published his first important articles, Bemerkungen über schweizerische Kathedralen ("Remarks about Swiss Cathedrals"). Year 1838 ( MDCCCXXXVIII) was a Common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Common 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"). Year 1847 ( MDCCCXLVII) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Common 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"^[2] which covered sculpture and architecture, as well as painting, became an indispensable guide to the art traveller in Italy. The term architecture (from Greek αρχιτεκτονικήarchitektoniki) can be used to mean a process a profession or documentation

About half of the original edition was devoted to the art of the Renaissance. The Renaissance (from French Renaissance, meaning "rebirth" Italian: Rinascimento, from re- "again" and nascere Thus Burckhardt was naturally led to write the two books for which he is best known, his 1860 Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien ("The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy") (English translation, by SGC 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 19th century and is still widely read. Burckhardt and the German historian George Voigt founded the historical study of the Renaissance. Georg Voigt was a German historian who was born in 1827 in Königsberg in East Prussia. 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 of 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. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15 1844 August 25 1900 ( was a nineteenth-century German philosopher and classical philologist 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. Heinrich Wölfflin ( June 21 1864 &ndash July 19 1945) was a famous Swiss Art critic, whose objective classifying principles

Jacob Burckhardt's grave

There is an interesting tension in Burckhardt's persona between the wise and worldly student of the Italian Renaissance, and the cautious product of Swiss Calvinism who had studied extensively for the ministry. The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 14th 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 19th 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. The Industrial Revolution was a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when major changes in agriculture manufacturing and transportation had a profound effect on the Events amply fulfilled his prediction of a cataclysmic 20th 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.

In 1872, upon Leopold von Ranke's retirement from the University of Berlin, Burckhardt was offered Ranke's erstwhile chair in history, but he declined the offer. Leopold von Ranke ( December 21, 1795 – May 23, 1886) was a German Historian of the 19th century and frequently considered

Notes

References

Primary:

• 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.
• 1943. Reflections on History. Introduction by Gottfried Dietze.

Secondary:

• Grosse, Jurgen, 1999, "Reading History: On Jacob Burckhardt as Source-Reader," Journal of the History of Ideas 60: 525-47.
• 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. Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette ( January 12, 1780 - June 16, 1849) was a German theologian. ISBN 0-521-65022-4
• Sigurdson, Richard, 2004. Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought. Univ. of Toronto Press.

External links

• Works by Jacob Burckhardt at Project Gutenberg
• 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