Jonathan Jones
In “Jacob Burckhardt: The Renaissance revisited”, a review of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of art and culture who died on this day in history, 8 August, 1897, Jonathan Jones concludes:
“The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is a classic of modernism. Its discomfort – the abrasive stress on violent change – is akin to the works of art that in Burckhardt’s day were at once quoting and mocking the past in an effort to represent the new. In 1863, in Paris, Manet painted Olympia, a portrait of a naked young woman reclining on a bed. Contemporaries saw her as a prostitute and recognised, with shock, that she is imitating the pose of Titian’s Venus of Urbino in the Uffizi. Manet’s painting is identical in mood to Burckhardt’s cultural history. Manet reaches back to the erotic art of the Italian Renaissance to create an ironic, shockingly unsentimental image of his own time. In just the same way and just as provocatively, Burckhardt finds in the schemes of Machiavelli a mirror of the new world of atomised individualism into which his own time was hurled. It is no coincidence that Sigmund Freud, whose unveiling of the unconscious was central to the collapse of Victorian self-confidence, reached back to Burckhardt in writing his own Renaissance study, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. For in the Swiss scholar’s haunting and eerie masterpiece, there is a madness lurking.”
