BURCKHARDT, JACOB. — Protestant historian, born in Basel on 25 May 1818, died there on 8 August 1897. After completing his secondary-school studies, he enrolled in the Faculty of Theology in his native city, from which, after two years, he transferred to Berlin, where, in the Faculty of Philosophy, he attended chiefly the courses of Ranke (history), Boeckh (classical antiquity), and Kugler (art history).
In 1853 he published a work on the age of Constantine (Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen), a work noteworthy not because it constitutes a fundamental study of that Roman emperor, but because of the approach it gave to the historiographical problem concerning an age of transition, in which the progressive decline of the classical age is counterbalanced by the new dawn of emerging Christianity, announcing the Middle Ages of the « res publica christiana ». Once medieval unity had been shattered, B. envisaged (and this was the inspiration underlying the genesis of the book) a reconstruction of that unity on spiritual foundations different from the directives of the Catholic Church and the Papacy, believing that in this way he could coordinate the particular needs of individuals and society, while maintaining the continuous flow of the historical process, according to which the age of Constantine, for example, would present not so much a predominant influence of Christianity over a dying paganism as an « inner development within paganism itself ». The political situation nevertheless did not encourage the ideal of a united and mutually supportive humanity, and B., with his fine sensitivity, increasingly distanced himself from Ranke’s historical vision and that of his followers.
After publishing Cicerone in 1855, an artistic guide to Italy, convinced that only the creative activity of the spirit, and therefore works of art, provides the exact measure of human worth, B. inaugurated the historiographical trend known as Kulturgeschichte, of which his Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) is a model. B.’s intention of elevating the Renaissance into a prototype of civilization, apart from the debatable nature of the assertion, led (and any other research inspired by a similar principle reaches the same results) to a monotonous and uniform levelling that excludes, in the various practical and spiritual activities of Renaissance man, any ethical and moral assessment of the individual and society, and therefore makes it impossible to formulate a true historical judgment.