A better book could not have fallen into my hands! An American professor in Venice recommended it, and after I read it I was only sorry I had not read it before going to Italy. The mystery of its medieval, rather Renaissance cities (Florence, Venice, among others) would have been clearer; even today's Italians' ways and personality. So much a product of Renaissance Italy...and its wonderful heritage from Ancient Rome. I truly recommend this book for Italy lovers, anyone going there soon, or for the sheer joy of reading a good history book. Jacob Burckkhardt is one of the most intelligent, enlightened historians I know.

I was around twelve when my grandmother mentioned having heard a speech delivered by Woodrow Wilson.

For me, until that moment, Woodrow Wilson had been in the same category with Julius Caesar: people who lived a long time ago. But for my grandmother, only Caesar could be in that category: Wilson was an early contemporary of her own. I began to realize that the citizens of the past were real people, that the lives of the past were lives as large and rich and strange as our own.

Everybody who survives high school can remember at least one teacher who made the study of history look like a matter of memorizing names and dates. Such teachers often manage to create in their students a permanent allergy to the study of history. But it has been two hundred years since they could do so with a good conscience.

Voltaire was the first modern writer of history--we might say, the first historian of culture. Chiefly through his masterpiece The Age of Louis XIV, he established the principle that history is not just about who ruled when and who killed whom--that it is about all the aspects of human culture, all the means--arts and entertainment, philosophy and religion and science, as well as economics, politics, and war--by which we seek to create permanent triumphs of mind over the natural forces of chaos and entropy.

We need not fool ourselves: those forces will finally destroy us and all our works. But while we live, we can make life richer for ourselves and for those who will follow us. The writer from whom I first learned that historical writing could be such an enriching force was Burckhardt.

The Renaissance was indeed the modern rebirth of ancient culture, but what makes it important is that through that rebirth people rediscovered a truth that the ancient Ionians had known and that had been lost sight of for more than a thousand years: that the natural world, and people as part of it, were worthy objects of study and understanding--not just creatures and tools of God. With this discovery, made permanent because it could now be broadcast by the new technology of printing, begins the process of modernity--the process that still continues to increase our world's psychological distance from the ancient and the medieval world.

Jacob Burckhardt had one of those rare minds who could construct a new synthesis out of thought, government, art, and culture -- and who, for the first time, made it possible to talk about the Renaissance as a moment in the history of Western man.

This is a very dense work with flashes of genius as well as long scholarly footnotes with extensively quoted Italian and Latin. In a book by a dullard, this would be excruciating. But Burckhardt is anything but as he manages his material like a Moscow taxi driver: by accelerating and then coasting. When you least expect it, another epiphany draws you in.

Burckhardt's Renaissance was an incredible high in the history of mankind. The Medicis, Sforzas, and Malatestas strut their way through the history of the period; Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bramante create works of the imagination that still overpower us; popes like Julius II, Alexander VI, and Leo X combine worldliness with spirituality (sometimes); and even the average man has a face and a voice for the first time.

This book will make your blood race.

..most of the plates are in black and white and not of a very high definition. i also wished for more detail plates of the major works.
still, though, a decent value for the price.

This is an excellent resource if you are looking for a comprehensive collection of photos of Michelangelo's works. Text is minimal but concise; the main focus is on the works themselves on page after page of gorgeous black and white photos. The only real drawback is that I would have liked to have seen more color plates of his paintings; there are only a few, focusing on the Sistine Chapel paintings, with close-up details shown in black and white photos.

This book provides great reference material.

I have a couple of books on Rodin and this is one of the goodones. I mostly enjoyed its photographs, It's inexpensive too.