" ... of art, we must speak "

Of all the art historians who founded the discipline through their teaching and publications in the ^19th century, Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) remains the only German-language author whose works - "Cicerone", "Renaissance Architecture in Italy" and "Souvenirs d'après Rubens" - are read today with as much interest as they were yesterday. Burckhardt's modernity is evident not only in his attempts to link the arts with the civilization of a particular period, but also in his reluctance to explain the genesis and essence of art by the same factors that condition a nation's civilization. Throughout his life, Burckhardt remained, in a way, the "saltimbanque" (as his friends called him) who liked to engage in fruitful contradictions, constantly combining his observations, thoughts and principles in original ways. My lectures attempt to highlight Burckhardt's guiding ideas as an art historian, without locking him into a strict method - which would be as inadequate for him as it was for his Basel colleague Friedrich Nietzsche. When speaking of Burckhardt's art-historical method, we must bear in mind what he said: "We have no method, at least not that of others". Burckhardt is known as the great propagator of Italian Renaissance art, but he also admired ^17th-century Dutch art. In the preparatory notes for his lectures on art history - notes that will be published in 2006 in volume 18 of the Works of Jacob Burckhardt, published by Beck (Munich) and Schwabe (Basel) - we recognize an art historian of universal vision, curious, strongly impressed by all styles and periods in which artists worked in complete independence from patrons and without exaggerating their originality. Burckhardt introduced an ethic for artists, combining the moral, social and artistic conditions that give a work of art its existence and eternal value. With his sober, precise and expressive language, he sought to master all the problems that arose in the vast field of art in relation to history and vice versa.