About The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world – a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics. In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘Ubermensch’ in its portrayal of an age of genius.
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Jacob Burckhard’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was first published almost a century ago, in 1860. Its forty-two-year-old author, professor of history and the history of art at the small Swiss university of his native Basel, was already known… More about Jacob Burckhardt
