Jacob Burckhardt

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Jacob Burckhardt bigraphy, stories - Historians

Jacob Burckhardt : biography

May 25, 1818 – August 8, 1897

Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (May 25, 1818 – August 8, 1897) was a historian of art and culture, and an influential figure in the historiography of each field. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history. Siegfried 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."Siegfried Giedion, in Space, Time and Architecture (6th ed.), p 3. 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 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,The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, Translated by Alexander Dru, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955; Liberty Fund Inc., 2001, xxviii-xxxii. 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 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 engineering school ETH Zurich. In 1858, he returned to Basel to assume the professorship he held until his 1893 retirement. Only starting in 1886 did he teach art history exclusively. 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.

See Life by Hans Trog in the Basler Jahrbuch for 1898, pp. 1–172.

Burckhardt is currently featured on the Swiss thousand franc banknote.

References and sources

References
Primary sources
  • 1878. . The Middlemore translation of the 1860 German original.
  • 1990. . Penguin Classics. ISBN 0-14-044534-X
  • 1999. The Greeks and Greek Civilization, Oswyn Murray, ed. New York: St Martin’s Griffin. ISBN 0-312-24447-9

reprints:

  • 1929. Translated by Harry Zohn. Foreword by Alberto Coll.
  • The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt. Selected, edited, and translated by Alexander Dru. Foreword by Alberto Coll, ISBN 0-86597-122-6.
  • 1943. Reflections on History. Introduction by Gottfried Dietze, ISBN 0-913966-37-1.

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 nineteenth-century notion that "history is past politics and politics current history."John Lukacs, Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge, ed. Mark G Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004, 215. 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).