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Revolutionary in his all-encompassing view of the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) saw developments in statecraft and war as the cause of more publicised artistic progress. First published in 1860, this work is considered his magnum opus and is reissued here in the 1878 two-volume English translation.

Ranging from the days of Ancient Egypt, through the Reformation to the time of Napoleon, this work presents a history of western civilisation. It was written during the time when the European empires spanned the globe, the modern age was being forged in the nationalist revolutions of 1848, and the western civilisation was in its pomp.

Published in 1860, Burckhardt's great work redefined our sense of the European past, wholly reinterpreting what has since been known simply as the Italian Renaissance. With unsurpassed erudition, Burckhardt illuminates a world of artistic and cultural ferment, innovation, and discovery; of revived humanism; of fierce tensions between church and empire; and of the birth of both the modern state and the modern individual. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy remains the single most important and influential account of this crucial moment in the history of the West.

For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics. In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche's concept of the 'Ubermensch' in its portrayal of an age of genius.

For the first time in English, one of the greatest masterpieces of historical writing: 'Every civilized library must have a copy.' CHRISTOPHER STACE, Telegraph