Jacob Burckhardts definition of the Renaissance!?
Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt was a Swiss historian of art and culture, and an influential figure in the historiography of each field. 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.” Burckhardt’s best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). This was the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance in the 19th century and is still widely read. All his observations of the Renaissance were astute: Burckhardt established the thesis that Renaissance art represented a break with the past, wherein representation became scientific, realistic, individualistic and humane; the visual analogue to the birth of the modern sensibility, one which left behind the superstitious mindset of the
