Burckhardt, Humanists, and the Remains of Antiquity

Abstract

Jacob Burckhardt was notoriously hostile to the humanists. In the third part of Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, ‘The Revival of Antiquity’, he presented them as a class of greedy and amoral courtiers, strangely devoted to reviving a dead language. When Burckhardt moved to describing individuals, however, he gave some of these scholars a more sympathetic portrayal. This chapter points to some of the reasons for Burckhardt’s hostility, and then shows that it was humanists engaged in rediscovering the material remains of antiquity who won his admiration. By comparing his approach to those of his 19th-century predecessors, this chapter argues that Burckhardt’s education and experience of Italy made him sympathetic to those scholars who had excavated the tangible evidence of the past, and to those artists, especially Raphael, who responded to them. Unlike their philologist contemporaries, they presented a creative way of reviving antiquity. This essay complements Barbara von Reibnitz’s demonstration of how Burckhardt understood the reception of antiquity, to illustrate the factors shaping his attitudes to the humanists in practice.