Jacob Burckhardt

Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (Basel, 1818-Basel, 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture whose work shaped both fields. He is best known for The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), and he is counted among the founders of cultural history as a discipline in its own right. He began his studies in Protestant theology, intending to become a clergyman, but he gave up that path in favour of history.

Born into a patrician family of Basel, the son of a Protestant pastor, he finished his theology degree in 1839 and then went to Berlin to study history, with a growing interest in art, a field then still new. There he heard lectures by Leopold von Ranke, who had helped establish history as an academic discipline grounded in sources. In 1841 he spent time in Bonn with Franz Theodor Kugler, to whom he dedicated his first book, on the artworks of Belgian cities. He taught in Basel, with interruptions, and at the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, returning to Basel in 1858 for the chair he kept until his retirement in 1893. He declined professorships at German universities, including Ranke's chair in Berlin.

His output covered several areas. The Age of Constantine the Great (1853) examined the shift from the Greco-Roman world to Christian culture, reflecting his fascination with periods of transition. The Cicerone (1855), an art guide to Italy covering architecture, sculpture and painting, was a great success with travellers. His most influential book, however, was The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Rather than confining himself to politics, he treated the state, religion, daily life, individuality and sociability as parts of a single whole. His most original contribution lay in the questions he asked: the historian chooses his subjects and approaches them from a personal standpoint rather than simply gathering documents.

His central ideas rest on the view that the state, religion and culture are three foundations that shape historical development, and that the relations among them explain the course of events. Influenced by Schopenhauer, he regarded the state with suspicion as an instrument of power, and he saw culture as the sphere in which individuality finds expression. His pessimism made him sceptical of simple progress and of the dominant historicism, and his comparative method led him to favour broad tendencies over detail. His lectures on Greek history, published after his death, show the same concern with culture as a key to understanding the past.

His influence was considerable. Nietzsche was his admirer and friend, and Heinrich Wölfflin, one of his students, became a central figure in the history of art. His conception of cultural history paved the way for later writers such as Johan Huizinga, and the picture of the Renaissance he drew remains a subject of debate. He is remembered today as one of the founders of art history and of modern cultural history.