CONCLUDING REMARKS

Now that this point in our historical view of Italian civilization has been reached, it is time to speak of the influence of antiquity, the ‘new birth’ of which has been one-sidedly chosen as the name to sum up the whole period. The conditions which have been hitherto described would have sufficed, apart from antiquity, to upturn and to mature the national mind; and most of the intellectual tendencies which yet remain to be noticed would be conceivable without it.1 Thus writes the famed Swiss historian of the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt, in his celebrated and highly influential The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published for the first time in 1860. Burckhardt, who had little penchant for “new birth,” even of the metaphorical type, goes on in his book to devote an entire section to it, entitled “The Revival of Antiquity.”2 He explains this seemingly dichotomous contradiction: “Both what has gone before and what we have still to discuss are coloured in a thousand ways by the influence of the ancient world; and though the essence of the phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival, it is only with and through this revival that they are actually manifested to us.”3 Burckhardt the trained and adept historian could not ignore the framework of rebirth that surrounded that phenomenological space and period known as the ‘Italian Renaissance,’ while Burckhardt the theoretician of modern progress and above all, of individualism, had little regard for the role of antiquity in that society which he saw, perhaps not coincidentally framed in a language opposed to ‘rebirth,’ as comprising “the firstborn among the sons of modern Europe.”4 For Burckhardt the protestant theologian, influenced by Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the human will, as well as by his older contemporaries such as Alexis de Tocqueville and others who were

1 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 104. 2 Kerrigan and Braden note that “Burckhardt is not especially happy with the designation ‘Renaissance,’ which he occasionally puts in quotation marks,” and that “the section in the Civilization on ‘the influence of antiquity . . .’ comes not first but third” in the order of Burckhardt’s treatments of ‘Renaissance’ topics. See: The Idea of the Renaissance, p. 10. 3 Burckhardt, p. 104. 4 Ibid., p. 81. concluding remarks 265 struggling with the rather new Enlightenment concepts of emancipation, private citizenship and liberty and questions of ‘individualism’ in general reigned supreme. In the oft quoted words of Burckhardt himself, his opinion held that medieval man “was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.” In the Renaissance, by contrast, “man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.”5 Such a language of individualism pervades Burckhardt’s work on the Italian Renaissance. Somewhat ironically, he found the penultimate model of individualism by himself looking back, not to antiquity, but to the Renaissance itself. Perhaps his proposition “that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world,” which he claims “as one of the chief propositions” of his book, penetrated Burckhardt’s own sense of novel genius. Perhaps he saw a turn to the Renaissance as a mere framework for his own theoretical ‘renaissance’. If so, then by definition of the very word, he dialectically truly saw his seemingly novel ‘genius’ in his ‘innovative’ ideas, already in the period under study. Whatever the case may be, Burckhardt’s ideas have had a wide- ranging impact on the study of the Renaissance, an impact which is still very much felt today. He most certainly influenced the philoso- pher, and historian of philosophy, Ernst Cassirer, who read the history of Renaissance thought in general as the history of the idea of the subjective individual. Mirroring Burckhardt’s dichotomous reading of history, Cassirer writes: In the medieval doctrine of two worlds, and in all the dualisms derived from it, man simply stands apart from the forces that are fighting over him; he is, in a sense, at their mercy. Though he experiences the conflict of these forces, he takes no active part in it . . . In the Renaissance a dif- ferent image emerges ever more clearly. The old image of Fortune with a wheel, seizing men and dragging them along, sometimes raising them, sometimes throwing them down into the abyss, now gives way to the depiction of Fortune with a sailboat. And this bark is not controlled by Fortune alone—man himself is steering it.6

5 Ibid. Italics in the original. 6 Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, pp. 76–77. For a critique of Cassirer, see Peter Gay, “The Social History of Ideas.” Gay argues that by focusing exclusively upon the history of ideas, Cassirer was excessively detached from social processes, and therefore from a more comprehensive understanding of history. This is quite ironic, given the appellation of Burckhardt, who clearly stands in the background of Cassirer’s