The German Genius

creations offered glimpses of divine wisdom, glimpses of perfection—meant that self-cultivation, through studying the achievements of geniuses, offered the cultivated individual the prospect of achieving an approximation of divine wisdom right here on earth.
    This was very much a halfway house of ideas that could only have existed in the transitional time between Principia Mathematica and the Origin of Species , between doubt and Darwin. This historical/artistic/biological view of the world, within the framework of striving for perfection, was to shape many of Germany’s thinkers, not a few of whom were themselves the sons of Pietist pastors. 62
    Bildung was, in its way, the most ingenious by-product of the development of doubt.

A T HIRD R ENAISSANCE, BETWEEN D OUBT AND D ARWIN
     

Winckelmann, Wolf, and Lessing: The Third Greek Revival and the Origins of Modern Scholarship
     
    T he Italian Renaissance was a German idea. The man who formulated it most clearly, Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), author of Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien ( The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy ; 1878), was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1818, but studied at the University of Berlin, where he attended the seminars of the most famous historian of the time, Leopold von Ranke. Burckhardt returned to Basel in 1843 and began to lecture there at the university, as well as edit a newspaper, the Basler Zeitung . Growing disillusioned with journalism, he abandoned it for full-time historical research, a move that led to his first major book, Die Zeit Konstantins des Grossen ( The Age of Constantine the Great ; 1853), soon followed by a historical guide to the art treasures of Italy, Der Cicerone ( The Cicerone ; 1855). These two works were so well received that they earned him a chair—in architecture and art history—at Zurich Polytechnic when it opened in 1855. Three years later he returned to the university at Basel and remained there for the rest of his life, spurning the invitation to become Ranke’s successor at Berlin. It was from Basel that, in 1860, he published his most famous book. 1
    Before Burckhardt, other writers and historians had introduced the phenomenon of the Renaissance. Petrarch (1304–74) was the first to recognize, on paper at least, the idea of the “Dark Ages,” that the thousand years—more or less—before he lived had been a period of decline, and that ancient history, poetry, and philosophy were “radiant examples” of a civilization that was the highest form of life before Christ appeared. Voltaire, Saverio Bettinelli, the French historian Jules Michelet, and Georg Voigt, professor of history at Munich, in his 1859 book Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums: oder, das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (The Revival of Classical Antiquity, or the First Century of Humanism), had all drawn attention to Renaissance Italy. Burckhardt’s ideas did not come out of nowhere.
    Nevertheless, his understanding of the Renaissance was much more coherent and complete than that of any of his predecessors. 2 It was Burckhardt who confirmed that the Italian Renaissance was far more than the rediscovery of antiquity: it had seen the development of the individual, it was then that the lineaments of modernity first appeared. Burckhardt maintained that society was now a self-conscious—and therefore a secular —entity as it had never been before.
    As Peter Burke, the Cambridge historian of ideas, has emphasized, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy did not lack for critics. After 150 years of increasingly specialized research, he said, “it is easy to point out exaggerations, rash generalisations and other weaknesses.” But though Burckhardt’s view of the Renaissance may be flawed, Burke agreed that “it is also difficult to replace.” Perhaps the single most important revision of Burckhardt’s argument is that of Charles Homer Haskins, professor of history at Harvard in the early decades of the twentieth century. Haskins’s contention was that the essentially Platonic revival in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which gave rise to the Italian Renaissance, was in fact, the second such classical revival in the West. The first, associated with the rediscovery not of Plato but of Aristotle, took place in the twelfth century and was marked by, for example, the new science of law and a unified legal system, which promoted the idea of shared knowledge that could be argued over, the