“When the young Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt was hoping to join the faculty at the newly founded Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich in the 1850s, his supporters felt that his work, much focused on the Renaissance, needed some leavening. The study of antiquity was the “heavyweight” academic discipline at the time and the Renaissance only a weak surrogate considered to be derivative. In short, they feared that his profile would not “do.” Listening to his advisors, Burckhardt wrote Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (1855) – perhaps the most successful art guidebook ever written – in which he discoursed about all the arts of Italy from antiquity to the baroque.1 The strategy worked: he duly received the appointment that same year and the rest is history. In his hands the Renaissance – and its architecture – was not destined to remain in the background for much longer.”

Volume I of the Companions to the History of Architecture

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