Burckhardt’s treatise on the Italian Renaissance is a comprehensive history of the cultural transition from the Middle Ages. He also seeks to explain why, in his view, the Renaissance started in Italy, as opposed to elsewhere in Europe. He begins, “The worst that can be said of the movement is that it was anti-popular, that through it Europe became for the first time sharply divided into the cultivated and uncultivated classes…. The civilization of Greece and Rome, which, ever since the fourteenth century, obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life, as the source and basis of culture, as the object and ideal of existence, partly also as an avowed reaction against preceding tendencies—this civilization had long been exerting a partial influence on medieval Europe…. That an age existed which idolized the ancient world and its products with an exclusive devotion was not the fault of individuals. It was the work of an historical providence, and all the culture of the ages which have followed, and of the ages to come, rests upon the fact that it was so.”
For Burckhardt, the prime example of the Renaissance artist was Dante Alighieri. “With unflinching frankness and sincerity he lays bare every shade of his joy and his sorrow, and moulds it resolutely into the strictest forms of art. Reading attentively these sonnets and canzoni, and the marvelous fragments of the diary of his youth which lie between them, we fancy that throughout the Middle Ages the poets have been purposely fleeing from themselves, and that he was the first to seek his own soul. Before his time we meet with many an artistic verse; but he is the first artist in the full sense of the word—the first who consciously casts immortal matter into an immortal form. Subjective feeling has here a full objective truth and greatness…. More than a century elapsed before the spiritual element in painting and sculpture attained a power of expression in any way analogous to that of the Divine Comedy.”
The twin aspects of the culture of the European Middles Ages that the Renaissance rebelled against were the primacy of State and Church. Burckhardt states that the conscience of the individual citizen first butted up against the demands of the Italian states, whether ruled as a principality or republic. “The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. The individual first inwardly casts off the authority of a state which, as a fact, is in most cases tyrannical and illegitimate…. The sight of victorious egotism in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm…. But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault of his own, but rather through an historical necessity…. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but necessary…. The Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging of a new age. Through his gifts and his passions, he has become the most characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of his time. By the side of profound corruption appeared human personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor medievalism either could or would bestow upon it.”
The Italian man of the Renaissance took it upon himself to wrestle free from the control of the Church. The individuality of his belief would no longer allow for him to bend his knee unflinchingly to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the Roman Pope. “The Italians were the first modern people of Europe who gave themselves boldly to speculations on freedom and necessity, and since they did so under violent and lawless political circumstances, in which evil seemed often to win a splendid and lasting victory, their belief in God began to waver…. Distinguishing keenly between good and evil, they yet are conscious of no sin. Every disturbance of their inward harmony they feel themselves able to make good out of the plastic resources of their own nature, and therefore they feel no repentance. The need of salvation thus becomes felt more and more dimly, while the ambitions and the intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether every thought of a world to come, or else caused it to assume a poetic instead of a dogmatic form…. That religion should again become an affair of the individual and of his own personal feeling was inevitable when the Church became corrupt in doctrine and tyrannous in practice.”
Finally, Burckhardt returns full circle, to the Italian humanists’ love of the classics as a model for living the best life. “Ancient literature now worshipped as something incomparable, is full of the victory of philosophy over religious tradition. An endless number of systems and fragments of systems were suddenly presented to the Italian mind, not as curiosities or even as heresies, but almost with the authority of dogmas, which had now to be reconciled rather than discriminated.”
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