On reading Burckhardt

It’s a long time since I opened a book by Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97), Swiss professor, and son of a priest. On turning to his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) I was expecting a stimulating, well-informed overview by a world expert in Italian culture and history (after all, Burckhardt was the author of the famous Cicerone, 1855, subtitled Art-guide to painting in Italy. For the use of travellers).

But what I read in the first few pages shocked me. Burckhardt is to history as the News of the World is to culture – only of interest if it is scandalous and, hopefully, immoral. Burckhardt is not interested in what happened when, who was in power and who came next. For Burckhardt, finding a spectacular crime or an appropriate anecdote is all – and I don’t think he particularly cares if it is not true, as long as it fits his case. Burckhardt’s Renaissance Italy is a creation of pure fantasy, a Sunday scandal newspaper approach to history. This is history as an impassioned statement of wild forces, characterised rather than summarised by melodramatic and lurid illustrations:

And what can be thought of Frederick III? His journeys to Italy have the air of holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the expense of those who wanted him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity is flattered to entertain an emperor… At Ferrara, on his second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a whole day without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty titles.

We aren’t told who Frederick III was, where he as emperor, what his background it; only that he was fabulously, thrillingly corrupt. Only a truly immoral man, he implies, would not leave his chamber when distributing titles.

Burckhardt is fascinated as well as repelled by immorality. The term “bastard” seems to raise his writing to fever pitch:

Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of the fifteenth century was the public indifference to legitimate birth, which to foreigners—for example, to Commines— appeared so remarkable. … In Italy, there no longer existed a princely house where even in the direct line of descent, bastards were not patiently tolerated.

You recognise the shocked Swiss bourgeois visiting Italy and becoming aroused and appalled by the sense of vice and immorality. No bastards in Switzerland, clearly. 

From henceforth that thoroughly immoral relation between the governments and their Condottieri, which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became more and more common.

Quite what is a “thoroughly immoral” relation? Was the rest of Europe particularly moral, at the time?

Burckhardt revels in lurid descriptions:

When in 1494 Charles VIII approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity that every house in the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled. the peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the fresh-grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts grew fat on the bodies of the slain, on so-called “Christian flesh.”

Alongside the prurient fascination with evil, there is casual racism:

taxes … were collected by those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is impossible to obtain any money from Orientals.

Moreover, Burckhardt succumbs to the same prejudice that affected many 19th-century German academics: a facile stereotypical view by northern Europeans of Italians as wildly passionate, and hopelessly incapable of living in organised societies, for example, the Renaissance princely states … “displaying the worst features of an unbridled egotism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture”. He uses throughout metaphors of health and disease (and it is pretty clear that Burckhardt and his home of Basel are the healthy ones).

When I look again at descriptions of Burckhardt, these characteristics for me invalidate him a serious thinker. What is all the more astonishing is how relatively recent figures praise him to the skies. Jonathan Jones in the Guardian (10 July 2010) states “His book drips with love of Italy and the Italians. It is … one of the most passionate homages ever paid by a northern European to southern Europe … its greatness as a book lies in its imaginative intoxication”. Intoxicated and wrong?

For Professor James Davidson, in the London Review of Books (20 August 1998), comparing Burckhardt’s treatment of ancient Greece with the Italian Renaissance, “Burckhardt’s account of the currents of energy within and between those epochs still depends on the clichés of dissipation, dilution and adulteration”.  That’s exactly what it is, and yet Burckhardt is not condemned for it. Davidson, incidentally, mistakenly describes Burckhardt as an “intellectual voluptuary”, when the phrase was actually used by Peter Gay to describe Macaulay. Davidson quotes, apparently admiringly, a typical anecdote from Burckhardt, on the subject of suicide:

An epidemic of this kind once afflicted the girls of Miletus, and was attributed to a morbid influence in the air; all of a sudden they longed for death, and many strangled themselves. The pleas and tears of their parents and friends had no effect, and they evaded the closest surveillance, until a clever man suggested a public edict stating that those who died in this way must be carried naked through the agora; this put an end to the problem.

Burckhardt’s sense of cultural (and sexual) superiority, of condemning the worlds he depicts, make him highly suspect as a cultural critic - those foolish, easily-led young girls. It’s as if Pevsner were to rewrite The Buildings of England based around the scandalous vicars who inhabited the parishes of which the church buildings are the only remaining evidence. Fun to read, but not history.