SOURCE: "Burckhardt and Nietzsche," in The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, pp. 67-88.

In the excerpt below, Heller describes Burckhardt's approach to original source material, positing an affinity between that employed by the historian and by the poet Goethe.

When in 1495 Raphael was apprenticed to Pietro Perugino at Perugia, this city was one of the many Renaissance centres of political strife, moral outrage and ruthless violence. Matarazzo, the chronicler of the Perugia of that time, relates in some detail the story of the two rival families, the Oddi and the Baglioni, interlocked in a deadly struggle for the possession of the city. The Baglioni had been victorious and remained for some time the overlords of the Republic. The Oddi and their soldiers lived as exiles in the valley between Perugia and Assisi, being attacked by, and counter-attacking, the Baglioni in a...