Volume 26, Number 15 · October 11, 1979
Back to Burckhardt
By Peter Burke
Renaissance Man
by Agnes Heller, translated by Richard E. Allen
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 481 pp., $35.00
Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy
by Lauro Martines
Knopf, 368 pp., $15.95
What is the best introduction to Renaissance Italy? 'Burckhardt, alas!' remains the most appropriate answer to that question. After a hundred and twenty years of intensive research into the subject, it is something of a scandal to have to recommend The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy as an introduction. All the more so because the book, however brilliant, has serious flaws. The picture Burckhardt presents of Italy from Dante to Michelangelo is much too static. His central themes, like 'the discovery of the world and of man,' 'the development of the individual,' and 'the state as a work of art,' are too fuzzy to bear the explanatory weight he lays on them. Above all, from the point of view of a late-twentieth-century reader, he has too little to say about the material and social setting of cultural life.
Review, 3285 words
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