from PART III - SPIRITUAL, CULTURAL AND ARTISTIC LIFE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
a discussion of Renaissance humanism must begin with Burckhardt, whose The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy has set the terms of debate and analysis from the time of its publication in 1860 up to the most recent scholarship. Burckhardt’s interpretation of humanism was not particularly novel, but he stated his views with powerful simplicity and systematic logic. No scholar can now accept Burckhardt’s thesis as a whole, but it must be conceded that he raised the crucial historical issues concerning humanism.
For Burckhardt, the Renaissance was not fundamentally about the revival of Antiquity: ‘the essence of the phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival’, which had ‘been one-sidedly chosen as the name to sum up the whole period’. In Burckhardt’s view, instead, the ‘characteristic stamp’ of the Renaissance was a new spirit of individualism. What was reborn in Italy from the mid-thirteenth to the early sixteenth century was not classicism but rather man himself.
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