BURKE 9780745648255 PRINT.indd

This book is a history of the culture of the Italian Renaissance in a period (roughly 1400–1550) in which contemporaries claimed that art and literature was ‘reborn’. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Renaissance movement was a systematic attempt to go forward by going back – in other words, to break with medieval tradition by following an older model, that of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Hundreds if not thousands of studies have been devoted to this topic. The most famous of them remains The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) by the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Writing over a hundred and fi fty years ago, Burckhardt viewed the Renaissance as a modern culture created by a modern society. Today, it looks rather more archaic. This shift in attitude is due in part to scholarly research on continuities between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, but even more to changes in conceptions of the ‘modern’. Since 1860 the classical tradition has withered away, the tradition of representational art has been broken, and rural societies have become urban and industrial (if not post-industrial) on a scale that dwarfs fi fteenthand sixteenth-century cities and their handicrafts. Renaissance Italy now looks ‘underdeveloped’, in the sense that the majority of the population worked on the land, while many were illiterate and all of them were dependent on animate sources of power, especially horses and oxen. This perspective makes the many cultural innovations of the period even more remarkable than they seemed in Burckhardt’s time. To understand and explain these innovations, which came in the course of time to constitute a new tradition, is the aim of this book.