The Swiss historian Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (1818-1897) was a philosophical historian whose books dealt with cultural and artistic history and whose lectures examined the forces that had shaped European history. Through the use of eyewitness...

Burckhardt, Jakob(1818 in Men and Events. New York: Harper, 1957, Ch....

Jacob Burckhardt (May 25, 1818, Basel, Switzerland – August 8, 1897, Basel) was a Swiss historian of art and culture, and an influential figure in the historiography of each field. Siegfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the...

Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity. By John R. Hinde. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 327. [pound]46.00. Few nineteenth-century historians have proved so difficult to pin down as Jacob Burckhardt. He has been characterized as a...

Jacob Burckhardt was as modest about his intellectual achievements as he was in the way he lived his life. Staying in a rented room for most of his academic life he maintained that he only managed to abstract universal truths by constructing analogies between...

In the excerpt below, Baron evaluates Burckhardt's concept of the Renaissance, assessing criticisms of it and outlining two areas of weakness in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.

Below, White analyzes Burckhardt's work within the framework of a structuralist theory of historiography. He emphasizes the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer on Burckhardt's thought.

In the excerpt below, Weintraub discusses Burckhardt's approach to art and art history.