Jacob Burckhardt

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Published in 1937: The author’s work on the Renaissance in Italy is too well known, not only to students of the period, but now a wider circle of readers, for any introduction to be necessary.

The Cicerone - Art-Guide to Painting in Italy is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1873. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

Republished in 1949, Jacob Burckhardt’s brilliant study, first published in Germany in 1852, has survived all its critics and presents today perhaps a more intelligible and a more valid picture of events, their nexus, and their relevance than any later study. This English version is apt to the moment. No epoch of remote history can be so relevant to modern interests as the period of transition between the ancient and the medieval world, when a familiar order of things visibly died and was supplanted by a new. Other transitions become apparent only in retrospect; that of the age of Constantine, like our own, was patent to contemporaries. Old institutions, in the sphere of culture as of government, had grown senile; economic balances were altered; peoples hitherto on the peripheries of civilization demanded attention, and a new and revolutionary social doctrine with an enormous emotional appeal was spread abroad by men with a religious zeal for a new and authoritarian cosmopolitanism and with a religious certainty that their end justified their means. For us, contemporary developments have made the analogy inescapable, but Jacob Burckhardt’s insight led him to a singularly clear apprehension of the meaning of the transition almost a century ago, and the analogy implicit in his book is the more impressive as it was unpremeditated.

Aus dem Buch: "Diese ist ein Kentaur, eine contradictio in adjecto; denn Geschichte, d. h. das Koordinieren, ist Nichtphilosophie und Philosophie, d.h. das Subordinieren, ist Nichtgeschichte. Die Philosophie aber, um uns zun chst mit ihr selbst auseinanderzusetzen, steht, wenn sie wirklich dem gro en allgemeinen Lebensr tsel direkt auf den Leib geht, hoch ber der Geschichte, welche im besten Falle dies Ziel nur mangelhaft und indirekt verfolgt." Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) war ein Schweizer Kulturhistoriker mit Schwerpunkt Kunstgeschichte. Er lehrte jahrzehntelang an der Universit t Basel. Grosse Bekanntheit erhielt er durch sein Buch Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien.

The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy By Jacob Burckhardt, Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore