Jacob Burckhardt: historiador del Renacimiento:

Comparto información sobre la obra de Jacob Burckhardt, historiador suizo descubridor de la edad del Renacimiento. Su obra es un testimonio de como tratar un periodo de la historia no solo en relacion a la pintura, escultura, y arquitectura sino a las instituciones sociales de su época.

Jacob Burckhardt

Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (May 25, 1818 – August 8, 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history.[1] Sigfried 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."[2] 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 Martin Leberecht 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,[3] 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 Theodor 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 Federal Polytechnic School. In 1858, he returned to Basel to assume the professorship he held until his 1893 retirement. He started to teach only art history in 1886. 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.

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 19th-century notion that "history is past politics and politics current history."[4] 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, he published his own work, Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen ("The Age of Constantine the Great"). He spent the greater part of the years 1853 and 1854 in Italy, collecting materials for his 1855 Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (7th German edition, 1899)("The Cicerone: or, Art-guide to painting in Italy. For the use of travellers" Translated into English by A. H. Clough in 1873), also dedicated to Kugler. The work, "the finest travel guide that has ever been written"[5] which covered sculpture and architecture, and 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 Cultur 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 19th 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.

"Judgments on History and Historians" is based on Burckhardt's lectures on history at the University of Basel between 1865 and 1885. It provides his insights and interpretation of the events of the entire sweep of Western Civilization from Antiquity to the Age of Revolution, including the Middle Ages, History from 1450 to 1598, the History of the Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Centuries.[6]

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, 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 28.

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 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 and commented 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 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 fashionable during his lifetime.

He also observed over a century ago that "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".[7]

Philosophy of History Part XII: Jacob Burckhardt: Civilization, Art, and Power Politics.

October 1, 2015 by Daniel Halverson 4 Comments

    I know too much of history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses but a future tyranny, which will be the end of history. –Jacob Burckhardt

Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) is the historian who, more than any other, is responsible for the concept of the Renaissance as a distinct historical epoch. Other historians had written about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, to be sure, but Burckhardt was the first to see the period as a unit, characterized not by the “rebirth” of antiquity, as Petrarch thought, but by the invention of something entirely new—modernity, which meant the birth of the individual and of the modern bureaucratic state.

He was born into one of the oldest and proudest families of Basel, which, with a few other families, ruled the city as a closed oligarchy until they were forced to grant a liberal constitution in 1847. This background led him, as it did many other aristocratic historians, to emphasize the role of the extraordinary individual in history, and to warn against the amorality and vulgarity of the newly enthroned “masses.” He studied under Leopold von Ranke as a young man, but his thought diverged sharply from his mentor’s. Where for Ranke the history that mattered was political history, for Burckhardt real history was the history of civilization, of high culture—compared to which politics was simply a monotonous record of crime and folly. Similarly, where for Ranke factual accuracy was everything, Burckhardt would have never dreamed of leaving out a revealing anecdote simply because it may not have actually happened. What mattered was to communicate the vital spark, the spirit of the age. And, where Ranke tried to treat the past systematically and exhaustively, Burckhardt never pretended to offer more than a general impression.

While visiting Italy, Burckhardt was inspired by its art, and, like another Gibbon, resolved to tell the story behind the monuments left behind by a forgotten era. He made his reputation with the two books that followed: The Age of Constantine (1853), and The Civilization of Renaissance Italy (1860), which studied the transition into, and out of, the Middle Ages, respectively. These won him a professorship in Basel, where he spent most of his life. He taught much, but wrote little, afterward. Offered Ranke’s old chair at the University of Berlin in 1874—then the very pinnacle of the historical profession—he turned it down. “In Basel,” he said, “I can say what I like.”

High culture was so important for Burckhardt because he believed it expressed, whether in a painting, a story, or a piece of music, the entire worldview of the artist, and more importantly, of the people who valued his art. Even though they might not be able to articulate their own thoughts and feelings so beautifully, they showed, by admiring and preserving it, that it spoke to them, and for them. But it was just because the Renaissance saw the birth of the individual that such art became possible. 

Medieval man, Burckhardt argued, thought of himself entirely in terms of society—his religion, his locality, his king, his order (i.e., aristocrat, clergy, or serf). The sum of these affiliations was the person. Dante, Petrarch, and Mirandola taught him to see in himself a unique and irreplaceable individual, who therefore had something unique and irreplaceable to express to his fellow men—something that had to be said before death foreclosed the possibility of speech forever.

This realization was not without its price, for it was not simply artists and authors, but also mercenaries, demagogues, and tyrants who felt the need for creative self-expression. They too had their art, and their plan to cheat death—the art of power, which they hoped would win them the immortality of fame. So the age of Michelangelo, Vasari, and Botticelli was also the age of Machiavelli, who instructed the world in the dark arts of power, of Cesare Borgia, who raped his sister, murdered his brother, and gleefully slaughtered civilians during every campaign, and of Julius II, who, though a pope, thought nothing of leading his armies in person, or of blessing the cannon before every battle. “How many,” Machiavelli wrote, “who could not gain distinction by praiseworthy acts, strove for it through disgraceful acts!”

According to Burckhardt, this is the essence of the modern state—a thoroughly amoral, power-obsessed monstrosity, only too ready to destroy the individual, and itself, simply because there is nothing to stop it. Certainly “the people” are not going to stop it, for they know everything, and, knowing everything, know nothing. It is only too easy for demagogues to get power over them by flattering their prejudices, and experience shows they will submit to practically anything that is packaged cleverly enough. Never particularly enthusiastic about liberalism, he became deeply hostile after the Franco-Prussian war (1871)—for Bismarck, that modern Machiavelli, used the war to transform a temporary alliance between petty German statelets into the German Empire. For

Burckhardt, its democratic politics, militarist foreign policy, and materialist philosophy perfectly expressed the brutal stupidity of the modern age, and heralded even worse things to come. He was sure that Germany would see the rise of a new kind of state, ruled by a “terrible simplifier,” and which knew no law but power.

Burckhardt’s views stood in direct opposition not only to those of Ranke, but also to the new positivist history of Karl Marx, which stressed the importance of economics and sought to reduce all history to a formula. He also rejected liberal history, which saw in the past nothing but the slow, steady march of reason through progress to the present. This was, for Burckhardt, simply history written by the winners, which ruthlessly and falsely silenced the voices of the vanquished. Needless to say, the historian of art championed the rights of history as art, and of the historian to rule, rather than to be ruled by, “mere facts.”

He was in many ways a reactionary who was out of step with his times, but it was just because of his isolation that he was immune to its worst vices. Blood and iron militarism, xenophobia, vulgar materialism, social Darwinism, and the mania for “scientific” socialism all passed him by, while he delivered prophetic but unheeded warnings about the slow, grim slide of democracy into tyranny. His influence is still felt in history and in political conservatism, but it remains most powerful in philosophy, where it was carried forward by his most brilliant student, Friedrich Nietzsche.

This post is the twelfth is a series on the philosophy of history; the previous article in the series is here, the next is here.

Daniel Halverson is a graduate student studying the history of Science and Technology of nineteenth-century Germany. He is also a regular contributor to the PEL Facebook page.

http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2015/10/01/philosophy-of-historty-part-xii-jacob-burckhardt-civilization-art-and-power-politics/