Notes From:Burckhardt: Relative Lack of Class Consciousness Among Italians

Toward the middle of the compiled notes on this period, Burckhardt gives a quick sketch on what he thought separated Italian culture from the rest of Europe before 1500. It is because he says it so simply and directly that I include it here. Words italicized are as printed in 1958 edition used here.*

"Outside of Italy, the nobility and the middle class were separated socially and remained so for a long time. the two had different cultures, almost; and each class was incapable by itself of supplying the basis for a complete culture. Especially in Germany the nobility became brutalized and ran wild...". [p.91]

He says that where there was not a king, like Francis in France acting as a center for culture to flourish around, then there was little culture to speak of. In literature, art, architecture, and in education, the old traditional scholastic and Gothic forms, "...seem to us mannered and tedious... a wooden mockery, by turns more didactic and more cynical." Outside Italy, he stresses, there was more superstition, more astrology and alchemy, rather than science. There were more quality mystics, he admits, but less harmonious a culture, overall. One with "... great incomplete and latent forces." [pp. 92-3]

On the other hand, Burckhardt says, Italy had an inner harmony. Italy was a "country of a common culture", where, "... the form of intercourse was a higher sociability independent of class differences, and its content was intellect."

"Toward the end of the fifteenth century, that which to other Europeans was still a conjecture and fantasy was already knowledge and a free object of thought to the Italians. Imagination was beautifully channeled into poetry and art.

The scope of the intellect, still a very close and narrow sphere among the other Europeans, , is here enormously widened through an interest in an ideally conceived Greco-Roman antiquity, ... and in nature and human life;  indeed, nature is expanded through a universal urge for knowledge, appreciation, and discovery that is no longer inhibited by the old scholastic system which still blanketed the rest of Europe." [p. 93]

He says, Italy thought about the soul differently too: self-aware, self-revealing. Yet seems less concerned about the man-made ravages of 'despotism' and credits the popes and Ludovico il Moro as graet patrons of the arts. The simple notion that 'everything can be done here and one must possess the best', is the 'conviction' that made Florence stand out among the best.


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* Jacob Burckhardt: Judgments on History and Historians: translated by Harry Zohn, Beacon Press, Boston, 1958