I
Burckhardt maintained that citizens and subjects,
condottieri and princes, artists and intellectuals, all
contributed to the formation of a new and distinctive
human type in Renaissance Italy. Powerful, highly
individualistic natures were to be found in each of these
groups: complete persons, as developed intellectually
as they were emotionally, as capable in theoretical
matters as they were in practical affairs. The mer-
chants, statesmen, and rulers who patronized the arts
and studied the classics, and the productive artists who
added to their mastery of several arts and crafts a
mastery of intellectual culture, found their counterpart
in the humanists, the intellectuals who combined a
scholarly passion for antiquity with concern for the
practical needs of their own society: “While studying
Pliny, [the humanist] made collections of natural his-
tory; the geography of the ancients was his guide in
treating of modern geography, their history was his
pattern in writing contemporary chronicles...; and
besides all this, he often acted as magistrate, secretary,
and diplomatist...” (1950, p. 85). These were the
“many-sided men,” a type which markedly increased
in number in the course of the fifteenth century; and
among them arose the “all-sided,” giants who
“mastered all the elements of the culture of the age.”
This is the universal man, exemplified for Burckhardt
by Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo.
Since Burckhardt, Alberti and Leonardo, and many
other Renaissance figures besides, have been seen and
understood in the light of his idea of universality. Yet
Burckhardt barely sketched the features of the com-
prehensive nature of the Renaissance man. He based
his incisive portrayal of Alberti upon some of Alberti's
literary works and upon an incomplete fifteenth-
century biography which gives a naive but enthusiastic
account of Alberti's gymnastic feats, of his study of
music and law, physics and mathematics, of his work
in the arts, his literary writings in Latin and the
vernacular, and of the personality traits that sustained
this vigorous, productive life: his iron will, his gener-
osity, his sympathetic delight in all creation of form,
natural and human. Burckhardt did not venture to
define the unifying principles or logical character of
Alberti's world of thought. And in Leonardo's case,
although he regarded him “as the finisher to the
beginner, as the master to the dilettante,” he refrained
even from describing the range of his achievements.
He left to future historians the task of analyzing the
intellectual culture of the universal man. But if he did
not investigate the theoretical grounds of Renaissance
universality, he did show how the political institutions
and conditions of life in the Italian city-states provided
a social context from which this type of person could
emerge.
The wealth and leisure, the municipal freedom and
social equality obtaining in the urban centers of
Renaissance Italy played a significant role in promoting
man's recognition of himself as “a spiritual individual,”
much as these conditions had in ancient Greece. To
them, Burckhardt added his distinctive conception of
the “rational” or “artificial” character of the Renais-
sance state as particularly conducive to the full devel-
opment of the individual's personality. Whether re-
publics or despotisms, the political order of the
Renaissance city-states was the “outcome of reflection
and calculation.” Public life, emancipated from the
traditional constraints of feudal society, came to be
deliberately shaped by the individuals and families who
seized and held power. The precariousness of a social
order that could invoke few customary sanctions to
support it, and the fact that power and status within
it could be won by intelligence and forcefulness, stim-
ulated to the fullest possible degree the self-realization
of the individual. Liberated from traditional concep-
tions of fixed class and corporate bounds, the individual
was seized by the impulse to realize all his natural
powers, to mold the self as well as the state as a work
of art.
At this point, Burckhardt introduced his seminal idea
of the development of the individual, and of the uni-
versal man. Although it gave rise to controversy as to
whether “individualism” and “universality” were not
also to be found in the Middle Ages (of course they
are, but they assume a different form in medieval
culture), this dispute has not been able to dislodge so
apt and useful an idea. It has been thoroughly incorpo-
rated in Renaissance historical writing from John
Addington Symonds' Renaissance in Italy (1875-86)
down to the present, and its elaboration by subsequent
historians has shed considerable light, not only upon
several Renaissance personalities, but upon the course
of Renaissance cultural and social developments as
well. The treatment which the concept has received
in Renaissance histories and biographies will be
sketched below by considering the relations between
the universal man and the intellectual culture and
social institutions of his time.
