The German Genius

wider use of Latin, the development of universities, and the growth of organized skepticism in scholarship. With the philosophy of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, which envisaged a secular world, came a unification of thought in theology and the liberal arts, giving rise to Summae , encyclopedic treatises aimed at synthesizing all knowledge, changes in worship, which promoted a rise in self-expression and individuality, and, perhaps most significant of all, the rise of the experimental method, giving birth to science as we know it. Among historians, then, if not yet among the general public, there were two renaissances, not one, with the first rather more important than the second.
    Against this background, a closer reading of Burckhardt’s book reveals some interesting further observations. 3 The Renaissance in Italy, he said, was characterized by the following elements: the revival of antiquity, the rediscovery of the texts of Plato and the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, before the years of Christian fundamentalism, “as the source and basis of culture…as the object and ideal of existence.” The recovery of the classics, Burckhardt said, led to the growth of textual criticism and the more advanced study of languages—there was a revival of new learning in which philology played a central role. It was in the High Renaissance (1513) that Pope Leo X reorganized Rome’s university, La Sapienza. The Florentines, Burckhardt said, “made antiquarian interests one of the chief objects of their lives,” accompanied by advances in the sphere of science. The treatise was revived, as was history writing, two forms of literature and inquiry that were felt as new. In philosophy, the Florentine Platonists had a massive influence on thought and on literature, aesthetics in particular. In poetry, ancient Greece and Rome were again the model, stimulating imitation but also more imaginative works by poets who were, in addition, often scholars. In natural history there were advances in botany (the first botanical gardens), and in zoology (the first collections of foreign animals). In art it was the era of “many-sided men,” individuals such as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, giants who shone in many different fields.
    In other sections of his book, Burckhardt said that attitudes to and beliefs about war changed in the Italian Renaissance. In a section on “War as a work of art,” he argued that “War assumed the character of a product of reflection.” And from Dante and Petrarch onward, there was in Italy a ferment of patriotism and nationalism. “Dante and Petrarch, in their day, proclaimed loudly a common Italy, the object of the highest efforts of all her children.”
    Finally, in music Burckhardt identified a characteristic of the Italian Renaissance as “the specialisation of the orchestra, the search for new instruments and modes of sound, and, in close connection with this tendency, the formation of a class of virtuosi , who devoted their whole attention to particular instruments or particular branches of music.” This all amounted to a celebration of humanism—the glories that humankind is capable of, without specific and continual reference to God.
    There is a saying in the military that the darkness is deepest under the light and it is the opening argument of this chapter that such is the case here. That Burckhardt, in shining the light of his intellect and his historical imagination on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, cast a shadow over the culture of which he himself was a part. It will be argued here that, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, there was a third classical revival in Europe, that it resulted in a flourishing—a renaissance—of the arts and sciences, that it saw great reflection and innovation in military affairs, and that it stimulated an unparalleled philosophical revival. This promoted a surge in new aesthetic theory (already introduced in the previous chapter), including advances by poets—such as Goethe and Schiller—who were also scholars and many-sided men. It was accompanied by a great surge in patriotism and a demand for unification—this time of Germany. Other parallels may be found in music and in Humanität , the German form of humanism. The greatest names in musical history—from Mozart to Arnold Schoenberg—were all German. The links between Wissenschaft , Bildung , and Innerlichkeit , formulated most forcefully in the