The Renaissance Revisited
Book in the spotlight: The Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt
Originally published in 1860, The Renaissance in Italy is Jacob Burckhardt’s 550-page analysis of what the Renaissance man saw when he gazed at the sky. It is not a linear history of the Renaissance, and is light on the when’s, where’s, and what’s of the period. The father of cultural history, the Swiss Burckhardt is more interested in conveying the spirit and zeitgeist of the Renaissance than in dates and events. Like all classic works, the text — or its authorized translation, at least — has preserved vitality and elegance, but its gallery of Renaissance figures, liberal use of Latin, and copious, turgid footnotes will probably defeat the general reader of 2025. The work was written with the scholar in mind, and if you don’t happen to be one, there are more engaging Renaissance histories in circulation. Yet The Renaissance in Italy, a magisterial text on par with Edward Gibbon’s epic account of Ancient Rome, offers a rich panorama of a great flowering of Western civilization, and readers willing to blow the dust off this book will be rewarded.
“In the beginning God created the Renaissance.” This is not the first sentence of the book, but it easily could be. For Burckhardt, the Renaissance was the genesis of modernity. This made Italy the cradle of modern civilization. Burckhardt claims Italy could lay claim to both Europe’s first modern city (Ferrara) and the first modern state (Florence). Thanks to their trade activity and exposure to the Islamic world, the Italian states — Florence and Venice in particular — were the first to develop a “true science of statistics,” making use of what we would today call data collection. Incubators of political doctrines and experiments, the Italian states invented political governance in the contemporary sense of the term. In fact, the Renaissance invented a new kind of man. Burckhardt traces man’s conception of himself as an individual to the Italian Renaissance. The man of the Middle Ages was essentially collectivist; his identity was based on his family, guild, or race. During the Renaissance, he began to see himself as an individual. Conformism gave way to singularity — Italians were no longer afraid of being different from their neighbors. Once man had acquired an individual conscience, he sought to perfect himself. The result was l’uomo universale, that “all-sided man” who, unlike his progenitor from the Middle Ages, was no longer content to possess an encyclopedic knowledge in a narrowly defined field. The development of individualism meant that individuals were now more interesting to write and read about, and Burckhardt says the Italians were the first to seriously tackle the genre of biography. The arts flourished; the great artists and humanists of the Renaissance toiled to redefine the human experience, immortalizing the era with their works. Finally, the Renaissance spawned the age of democratization. Although we do not ordinarily associate the Italian Renaissance with democracy, Burckhardt argues that the Renaissance marked the dismantling of class distinctions. The rigid social hierarchy of the medieval times had melted away; one’s origins had lost their importance. Whatever qualifications there are to be made — and Burckhardt makes a few — the inexorable trajectory was a fusion of classes. We are, all of us, children of the Renaissance.
But the golden age of Dante and Petrarch was not a particularly happy time to be alive. The historian and thinker Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy wrote that the Italian Renaissance was a world going fascist. The Renaissance in Italy suggests this is no hyperbole. The Italian states were tyrannical and despotic, and, oligarchic Venice excepted, those in power tended to have no political legitimacy. The Church had lost most of its credibility and was universally reviled. Violence was endemic; people dispatched each other with ease and at little cost; the life of a single individual meant nothing. Crime went unpunished to such an extent that Burckhardt expresses amazement society didn’t collapse completely. He bemoans the disintegration of faith that permeated Renaissance society and is particularly scathing of its fascination with astrology. Rightly so — the Christianity of the Renaissance man was certainly peculiar. We read about a peasant who experienced considerable mental angst at the confessional because he had consumed a few drops of milk while making cheese during Lent. The confessor subsequently established that the penitent was in the habit of robbing and murdering travelers. A strange kind of religiosity, and one that Burckhardt doesn’t really explain. Others have tried. The Russian religious thinker Nikolai Berdyaev says in The Meaning of History that the Renaissance was a reaction to the Christian triumph of man over nature. The ancient Greeks and Romans were dominated by nature; Christianity had turned this upside down. Berdyaev defines the Renaissance as a return to nature and antiquity. Catholic Italy had never entirely broken with the spirit of Ancient Rome, which is why the Reformation could have never happened on Italian soil. The Church’s happy coexistence with its dormant Roman traditions allowed the Popes to commission paintings that depicted pagan scenes and accommodated many other contradictions.
Without meaning to, The Renaissance in Italy illustrates the dialectic of culture and civilization. The former represents the cultivation of one’s inner world; the latter, the cultivation of one’s living standards. The two, Berdyaev teaches us, are dichotomic; every culture carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Sooner or later, man ceases to cultivate his soul and turns his attention to what’s outside. The Renaissance was the opposite of our world: it possessed an incredibly rich culture, but its civilization was dismal. On the one hand, there were Dante and Petrarch; on the other, peasants butchering women and children to settle age-old vendettas. Burckhardt does not paper over the dark side of the Renaissance, but he is certain that it was vastly superior to the Middle Ages and the northern lands of Europe as yet untouched by the Italian climate. He is probably right. But had the Middle Ages really ended with the Renaissance? One reads in Johan Huizinga, who knew the Middle Ages like the back of his hand, of Umbrian peasants who, circa the year 1000, wanted to kill the hermit Saint Romuald to get his sacred bones; of the monks of Fossanuova who, following the death of Thomas Aquinas at their monastery, decapitated and boiled his body to preserve the relic; of a crowd of worshipers that, in 1231, mauled the corpse of Saint Elizabeth as she lay in state, sparing not even her nipples; of King Charles VI of France, who served his guests ribs of his ancestor Saint Louis at a solemn occasion in 1392 — were they any different from the peasant of the Renaissance who thought nothing of murdering travelers but felt distraught about a few droplets of milk during Lent? Delineation of historical periods is arbitrary; Italians did not just wake up one morning to find the Renaissance unfolding outside the window. Nor do we need to go all the way back to the Middle Ages — the 20th century showed that, in many ways, the Middle Ages have never disappeared.
Burckhardt’s unforgettable description of the period’s penchant for exotic animals makes the point. Renaissance elites liked to import fauna from other parts of the world, buying them from the south or accepting them as gifts from the Ottoman Sultans. Always happy to give the Renaissance the credit, whatever the occasion, Burckhardt says those menageries were the foundations of scientific zoology. But, as usual, there was an ugly side to it. Burckhardt mentions, en passant, that some of the more predatory animals were used as “executioners of political judgments.” It is in a footnote below that one unearths a charmingly edifying account of an incident in 1459. At the reception of the Pope and the Duke of Milan in Florence, bulls, boars, dogs, horses, lions, and a giraffe were brought together in an enclosed space. The animals were to entertain the guests by tearing each other to pieces. But, at the crucial moment, the lions lay down, unwilling to attack the other animals. A poignant scene — but the reader is not told whether the grandees learned anything from it.
