Abstract

Nietzsche’s relationship with Burckhardt’s image of the Renaissance was a way of practicing history. Nietzsche shared with Burckhardt the preference for typology, the belief that truth is reached intuitively and concerns the inner identity of all things, and for great cultural historical objects and individuals. And he shared it with him in some part precisely because two of their most significant common influences were Goethe and Schopenhauer. Beyond this, I argue that there are a few minor and a few more significant disjunctions in their approach to the historiography of the Renaissance. I address what we might call the question of motive: that Burckhardt’s purpose in construing the Renaissance was in fact quite opposed to Nietzsche’s more radical gaze upon history.