雅各·布克哈特

雅各·布克哈特（德语：Jacob Christoph Burckhardt，1818年5月25日—1897年8月8日），生于瑞士巴塞尔，并在出生地终老，杰出的文化历史学家，他的研究重点在于欧洲艺术史与人文主义。 在巴塞尔结束神学的学业后，布克哈特在1839年到柏林洪堡大学参加利奥波德·冯·兰克的讨论课，深受启发，并于1841年至波昂大学研习历史。他在1843年成为巴塞尔大学的教授，虽于1855至1858年间短期转至苏黎世联邦理工学院，之后还是回到该校任教。

最著名的著作是《意大利文艺复兴时代的文化》(1860)（Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: ein Versuch）。在这本书中，他认为文艺复兴是一个“人的发现”的时代。

雅各·布克哈特头像还被印在瑞士千法郎钞票上。

Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (Swiss Standard German: [ˈbʊrkhart]; 25 May 1818 – 8 August 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. His best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history. Sigfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well."

Life

The son of a Protestant clergyman, Burckhardt was born in Basel, where he studied theology in the hope of taking holy orders; however, under the influence of Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, he chose not to become a clergyman. He was a member of the patrician Burckhardt family.

Burckhardt finished his degree in 1839 and went to the University of Berlin to study history, especially art history, then a new field. At Berlin, he attended lectures by Leopold von Ranke, the founder of history as a respectable academic discipline based on sources and records rather than personal opinions. He spent part of 1841 at the University of Bonn, studying under the art historian Franz Theodor Kugler, to whom he dedicated his first book, Die Kunstwerke der belgischen Städte (1842).

Burckhardt taught at the University of Basel from 1843 to 1855, then at the Federal Polytechnic School. In 1858, he returned to Basel to assume the professorship he held until his retirement in 1893. He started to teach only art history in 1886. He twice declined offers of professorial chairs at German universities, at the University of Tübingen in 1867 and Ranke's chair at the University of Berlin in 1872.

Work

Burckhardt's historical writings did much to establish the importance of art in the study of history; indeed, he was one of the "founding fathers of art history" but also one of the original creators of cultural history. Contra John Lukacs, who has argued that Burckhardt represents one of the first historians to rise above the narrow 19th-century notion that "history is past politics and politics current history," Lionel Gossman claims that in stressing the importance of art, literature, and architecture as a primary source for the study of history, Burckhardt (in common with later Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga) saw himself as working in the tradition of the French romantic historian Jules Michelet. Burckhardt's unsystematic approach to history was strongly opposed to the interpretations of Hegelianism, which was popular at the time; economism as an interpretation of history; and positivism, which had come to dominate scientific discourses (including the discourse of the social sciences).

In 1838, Burckhardt made his first journey to Italy and published his first important article, "Bemerkungen über schweizerische Kathedralen" ("Remarks about Swiss Cathedrals"). Burckhardt delivered a series of lectures at the University of Basel, which were published in 1943 by Pantheon Books Inc., under the title Force and Freedom: An Interpretation of History by Jacob Burckhardt. In 1847, he brought out new editions of Kugler's two great works, Geschichte der Malerei and Kunstgeschichte, and in 1853, he published his own work, Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen ("The Age of Constantine the Great"). He spent the greater part of the years 1853 and 1854 in Italy, collecting material for his 1855 Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens ("The Cicerone: or, Art-guide to painting in Italy. For the use of travellers") also dedicated to Kugler. The work, "the finest travel guide that has ever been written" which covered sculpture and architecture, and painting, became an indispensable guide to the art traveller in Italy.