Burckhardt was born in 1818 into a family which was a minor branch of one of the great burgher clans of Basle: the name of Burckhardt had been prominent in the city since the fifteenth century. His father was a Protestant minister who had been much influenced by Schleiermacher’s theology.
Basle was a patrician city, conservative and increasingly prosperous, at the same time as being detached from the turbulence of European political events; Burckhardt belonged to its intelligentsia. He completed a degree in theology at Basle, but ceased to be religious, having become convinced by his youthful studies that the life of Christ was a myth. In 1839 he went to Berlin to study history under Ranke, Boeckh and Droysen; but his closest friend and greatest influence was Franz Kugler, the bohemian professor in the new subject of art history. In another friend, Gottfried Kinkel, he fouone of the last of the great Romantics; he moved into the circle of Kinkel’s mistress, the divorced Johanna Matthieux, and of Bettina von Amim, who had once loved Goethe and who lived in Berlin with her sister, the widow of the great legal historian F. C. von Savigny. Burckhardt was Kinkel’s best man at his wedding with Johanna in 1844; but he distanced himself from him during Kinkel’s subsequent career as a revolutionary. Kinkel was con- demned to death in 1848, and escaped with his wife’s help to exile in London, where Johanna finally committed suicide.
Burckhardt was safely back in Basle in 1844, where he served for eighteen months as editor of the main conservative newspaper, the Basler Zeitung.
He was already lecturing at the university on the history of painting, where he caused offence in religious circles by criticizing the dominant Nazarene School, a group of German religious painters in Rome who served as a model for the later pre-Raphaelites. In 1852 he resigned from the university and left for Italy, where he wrote the immensely popular Cicerone (1854), ‘a guide to the enjoyment of art in Italy’, which remained the standard guidebook to Renaissance Italian architecture, sculpture and art for three generations and went through seven editions during his lifetime. On the basis of this he was given a post at the Zürich Polytechnic. In 1858 he was appointed Professor of History at Basle, where he was required to lecture both at the university and at the high school; from 1874 he was also Professor of the History of Art. The first post he held until 1885, and the second until xii Editor's Introduction 1893. He was a conscientious and assiduous lecturer in both history and history of art, who taught as much as ten hours weekly, and also gave many lectures for the general public.
Burckhardt never married (although as a young man he was in love and wrote poetry to a girl whose parents disapproved); his youthful German friends drifted away, and in his thirties he confessed to being lonely beyond all expectations. He had a few close friends with whom he corresponded, and lived a regular and uneventful life in two rooms above a baker’s shop, devoting himself to his lectures, his books and his travels.
Politically Burckhardt was a natural conservative, who disliked and despised the new industrialization and the development of the national state: he foresaw in the course of his own lifetime the coming of an age of ‘terribles simplificateurs’ and demagogues, who would control the masses and bring ruin to Europe. This pessimistic conservatism is characteristic of a reflective historian, who cultivated irony and distance from the enthusiasm of contemporary nationalist historians. In so far as he foresaw the development of industrial society towards the totalitarian popular regimes of National Socialism and Marxism, he was of course a prophet out of his time, standing against the tide of history. But he was not a political thinker; and these prejudices, however clear-sighted, are merely the regrets of a marginal observer over the decline of the patrician order to which his own family so clearly belonged. Hence his attack on the vice of reading news-papers and concerning oneself with the agitations of the present in the introduction to the present book. It is not Burckhardt’s political views or his pessimism in regard to the future which matter, but his conception of historical method; as he wrote already in 1846:
But, my dear friend, Freedom and the State have lost nothing in me. States are not built with men like me; though as long as I live I mean to be kind and sympathetic to my neighbour; I mean to be a good private individual, an affectionate friend, a good spirit; I have some talent in that direction and mean to develop it I can do nothing more with society as a whole; my attitude towards it is willy-nilly ironical; the details are my affair... we may all perish, but at least I want to discover the interest for which I am to perish, namely the ancient culture of Europe.
So he developed the mask of a dilettante, immersed in his work and his few friends, and devoted to the study of European culture, by which he meant the artistic, literary and spiritual achievements of the past, placed in their context and explained as the result of the forces of history. History was the contemplation of the past: ‘leisure, the mother of contemplation and of the inspiration that springs from it’ (writing from London); ‘Listen to the secret of things. The contemplative mood.’ ‘How is the collector of inscriptions to find time for contemplative work? Why, they don’t even know their Thucydides! Don’t bother about others.’
from: The Greeks and Greek Civilization
No comments:
Post a Comment