The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

De: Jacob Burckhardt

Narrado por: Geoffrey Howard

In this landmark study of Italy from the 14th through the early 16th centuries, Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt chronicles the rise of Florence and Venice as powerful city-states, the breakup of the medieval worldview that came with the rediscovery of Greek and Roman culture, and the new emphasis on the role of the individual. All these, Burckhardt explains, went hand in hand with the explorations of science and the more naturalistic depiction of the world in art and literature.

Within the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Burckhardt finds the first stirrings of the modern world and, in the Renaissance Italian, the first modern man. His book-length essay includes discussions of all aspects of Italian civilization: art, fashion, literature, and the music of the time, as well as the flourishing of intellectual and spiritual life.

(P)2000 Blackstone Audio Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"An engrossing world of politics and popes, religion and renegades, lifestyles and literature that few historical works encompass....a joy for devotees of the Renaissance." (AudioFile)

Reads more like a dissertation,

very factual but without any flow, could be a good reference source for students and scholars.

Difficult for listening

This is a difficult book to enjoy in audio format. The somewhat archaic prose is difficult to follow if you use audiobooks as I do, which is often during some other menial task (driving, cleaning, ect) that doesn't require my full attention. Books like this are more suited towards the concentration that comes from reading. Also, this book assumes you already know a lot of the fundamentals of renaissance and medieval Italy. For example one is assumed to already know and understand the conflict between Guelph and Ghibelline, as well as what the Condottieri are and their role. Without some prior knowledge this book will be confusing, and for most it would be better read than listened to.

Too Much Labor Listening Without Enough Learning

In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Jacob Burckhardt relates the causes, nature, culture, and effects of the Renaissance in Italy—in exhausting detail. The best part for me was Part One, The State as a Work of Art, a grim but witty survey of 14th- and 15th-century Italian despotism and mayhem: feuding families, bastard inheritors, Condottieri rulers, nephews assasinating uncles, popes inviting rivals to Rome and then beheading them, and suffering commoners. Interestingly, the leaders of such tyrannical and chaotic Italian states lavishly patronized the arts, as in Petrarch’s poetry and Raphael’s paintings.

In addition to The State as a Work of Art, Burckhardt covers the following major topics:

Part Two: The Development of the Individual
Part Three: The Revival of Antiquity
Part Four: The Discovery of the World and of Man
Part Five: Society and Festivals
Part Six: Morality and Religion

Although it doesn’t directly and detailedly talk much about particular works of art or their creators, the book indeed contains much interesting information and many interesting ideas about the Renaissance and related matters. Like the following:

--The Reformation led to the salvation of the Catholic church in the Counter Reformation.

--Copiests were in great demand to help disperse the writings of the ancients.

-- In Italy, poetry was a hundred years ahead of painting in becoming more observant of and admiring of the world and humanity.

--“…women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men” and mixed in intellectual circles as participants and patronesses and were permitted as much adultery as their husbands.

--The excessive crime and lawlessness (murder of passion, murder for hire, vendetta, rape, brigandage, destruction, etc.) of Italy derived from its virtues as the leading land of the individual (excessive independence and egoism), as well as from the corruption of the church, which offered no moral compass to the people.

Burckhardt does occasionally reveal his 19th-century European Christian prejudices by, for instance, commenting that women wearing too much make up in the Renaissance were equivalent to “the painting of savages” or by referring to Muslims as barbarians. At the same time, he also often transcends his era by, for example, revealing that it’s unfair to condemn women for committing the same sins as those committed by men.

And Burckhardt is often engaging, even entertaining. Here’s an example of what I like about his writing when he’s on his game:

“Compared with the sharp pens of the eighteenth century, Aretino had the advantage that he was not burdened with principles, neither with liberalism nor philanthropy nor any other virtue, nor even with science; his whole baggage consisted of the well-known motto, ‘Veritas odium parit.’ He never, consequently, found himself in the false position of Voltaire, who was forced to disown his ‘Pucelle’ and conceal all his life the authorship of other works. Aretino put his name to all he wrote, and openly gloried in his notorious ‘Ragionamenti.’ His literary talent, his clear and sparkling style, his varied observation of men and things, would have made him a considerable writer under any circumstances destitute as he was of the power of conceiving a genuine work of art, such as a true dramatic comedy; and to the coarsest as well as the most refined malice he added a grotesque wit so brilliant that in some cases it does not fall short of that of Rabelais… The tone in which he appealed to Clement VII not to complain or to think of vengeance, but to forgive, at the moment when the wailings of the devastated city were ascending to the Castle of St. Angelo, where the Pope himself was a prisoner, is the mockery of a devil or a monkey.”

Granted, I don’t know quite what “Veritas odium parit” and “Ragionamenti” mean and had never heard of Aretino, I love Burckhardt’s character sketch of the notorious satirist.

But there are also too many passages with too many names and titles etc. that go in one eye and out the other, like this one:

“By the side of these local temples of fame, which myth, legend, popular admiration, and literary tradition combined to create, the poet-scholars built up a great Pantheon of worldwide celebrity. They made collections of famous men and famous women, often in direct imitation of Cornelius Nepos, the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (Mulierum virtutes), Hieronymus (De Viris Illustribus), and others: or they wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies, as was done by Petrarch in his ‘Trionfo della Fama,’ and Boccaccio in the ‘Amorosa Visione,’ with hundreds of names, of which three-fourths at least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages. By-and-by this new and comparatively modern element was treated with greater emphasis; the historians began to insert descriptions of character, and collections arose of the biographies of distinguished contemporaries, like those of Filippo Villani, Vespasiano Fiorentino, Bartolommeo Facio, Paolo Cortese, and lastly of Paolo Giovio.”

Eek! Such passages soon started numbing me to the interesting information and ideas elsewhere in the book. I retained so little of what I heard. I didn’t learn enough to offset the eye-glazed labor of listening to it. Gods! I’ve never felt so relieved to have a book finally end than I did with this one.

Even the normally splendid Ralph Cosham (who does perfect Louise Penny, Watership Down, A Little History of the World, the Alice books, and so on) couldn’t help here. In fact, I even wearied of him! Burckhardt’s book became the perfect storm of a monotonous reader and a dryly (if wittily) written subject with myriad unfamiliar names as examples. I’m not sure if a different reader would have improved it or worsened it.

A special shout out to the producers of the Blackstone audiobook, for putting on the “cover” the *egregiously* anachronistic painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) The Birth of Venus (1879). It is a lovely, realistic, sexy painting, but it is a 19th-century Academy painting, not a 14th- or 15th-century Renaissance painting. Far better to have used Botticelli's much more charming RENAISSANCE painting of the same scene.

A nest as beautiful as the bird(s) it bore

Often, when writing about the Renaissance there is tendency among experts/writers/historians to focus on the well-plumed bird and ignore the nest. Burckhardt spends nearly 400 pages carefully detailing the Tuscan nest of the Renaissance that embraced, protected, and incubated the great Italian artists of the Rinascimento (Giotto to Michelangelo, etc).

Burckhardt first describes the state in Italy and carefully describes the rise of the despots, the energy of the republics, and the push and the pull of the papacy. He builds on this, describing the development of the individual, Italy's relationship with its Classical past. Finally, Burckhardt details the science, society and religion of Italy during those impressive years between 1350 and 1550.

I think Daniel J. Boorstin summarized it best when he said Burckhardt "offered a classic portrait of the men and institutions that gave the era its characters and made it the mother of modern European civilization."

Like Gibbon's fantastic 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' it is tempting to gloss over how drastically the craft of history was changed by this book. Burckhardt wasn't interested in a stale or utilitarian history. He wanted a nest that was just as beautiful as the bird it bore.

A Learned Book from 150 Years Ago

For a contemporary author of history to write a book of real merit it is required that the author have mastered the material that is the subject of the book, found wisdom in those studies, and most importantly must be able to present his work in a style that renders the material comprehensible and appealing to a wide readership.

When reading a work penned 150 years ago, one must allow for the change in writing styles from then to now. For example just try reading On War by Carl von Clausewitz or even Geoffrey Chaucer or even William Shakespeare in their original wordings. It should also go without saying that when the author refers to now he means his contemporary now of a 150 years ago, which means, his ideology reflect his era not ours.

Thus, Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy like The Prince by Niccol?? Machiavelli or The Inferno by Dante Alighieri needs some knowledge of the era to be truly appreciated. Because of the arcane style of this book, if you don't already have knowledge of both the Renaissance in Italy and the author's 1800's this work may not be the best place to acquire it.

Geoffrey Howard did an able job in his narration.

Like a questionnaire

I regret purchasing this book. I gave it up after listening for close to 3 hours because I feel that it reads like a questionnaire. A long list of names and accompanaying each: Was he gruesome? Yes, no. Did he try to grab wealth wherever possible? Yes, no. Did he have a wife renowned for her beauty and devotion to the local church? Yes, no. Did he murder someone? Yes, no. Was he murdered? But no presentation, and no future promise of one, on what these facts may possibly relate to use about the renaissance in Italy. Extremely boring in my opinion.