The Finite Renaissance

First published in German in 1860 and in English in 1878, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy continues to be credited with having brought into being the distinct historical period known ever since as the Renaissance. And yet there is one basic aspect of the period Burckhardt defined that has been overlooked: its terminus ad quem. According to Burckhardt, the Renaissance ended with the Reformation.

One reader of Burckhardt’s Renaissance in Italy, however, did not miss this endpoint: Burckhardt’s sometime friend and junior colleague at the University of Basel, Friedrich Nietzsche.¹ For Nietzsche, the Renaissance was cut off, prematurely and conclusively. Only in his mind’s eye did it attain full-blown glory:

I have a vision of a possibility, one that has perfect, super-terrestial magic and multi-coloured charm:—it seems to shimmer with all the tremors of refined beauty, it seems that an art is at work in it, so divine, so diabolically divine that you will look in vain through millennia for a second possibility like this.

(64)

What is the subject of this “vision of a possibility”? “Cesare Borgia as Pope” (64)—the impious Renaissance renegade seated on the sancta sedes. The image comes into focus as an artwork, a portrait, perhaps, like those painted by Raphael of the great patron Julius II or the illustrious Medici Leo X. But the sitter that Nietzsche envisions is not Christ’s vicar but the notorious Borgia despot. He relishes the irony, “Christianity . . . overcome at its source,” the long history of the holy apostolic Church from St. Peter onward culminating in Cesare Borgia, a marvel of self-aggrandizing individualism: “with this [victory], Christianity was abolished!” (65).

This “vision,” however, is only a virtual one, for history had taken another course. “What happened?” Nietzsche asks. “A German monk, Luther, came to Rome,” saw that very same “vision,” but totally misconstrued it. Luther thought it an image of “papal corruption” when in fact “Christianity was not sitting on the papal seat anymore!” Occupying it instead was the unabashed worldliness of the Renaissance. Mistaking his target, Luther “flew into a rage . . . against the Renaissance.” In doing so, he not only spared the papacy but ushered in a new and more virulent strain of Christianity, “the most unclean type of Christianity, that there is, the most incurable, the most irrefutable, Protestantism.” By resuscitating and redoubling life-negating Christianity, Luther destroyed “the last great age, the age of the Renaissance.”² For shattering the possibility of a triumphant life-affirming Renaissance, Nietzsche will never forgive Luther and his legacy: “If we do not get rid of Christianity, it will be the fault of the Germans . . .” (65).

Perhaps Nietzsche’s febrile musings here should be attributed to his imbalanced mental state, for they were written in 1888, a year before his breakdown. But the narrative source for his “vision of a possibility” is Burckhardt. It is Burckhardt who invites speculation as to what might have happened had Cesare, “the great criminal” (71), made it to the papal throne. According to his account, after the death of Cesare’s father, Pope Alexander VI, all stood propitious for Cesare’s succession: the papal office was on the verge of collapse, enfeebled by the rapacious worldliness of its occupants. Poison had weakened opposition in the conclave; a strong army was in place to back Cesare and none stood to resist him. At this point Burckhardt also lapses into a counterfactual reverie: “And what might not Cesare have achieved if, at the moment when his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sickbed! . . . In pursuing such a hypothesis, the imagination loses itself in an abyss” (73). Again and again, Burckhardt invites the reader to imagine history with no Reformation: “without the Reformation—if, indeed, it is possible to think it away—the whole ecclesiastical State would long ago have passed into secular hands” (79); “[a]nd who can say what fate was in store for the Papacy itself, if the Reformation had not saved it?” (284).

It is Burckhardt, then, who...