SOURCE: "Burckhardt's Renaissance," in The Idea of the Renaissance, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pp. 3-35.

In the following excerpt, Kerrigan and Braden analyze Burkhardt's understanding of Renaissance individualism and posit that, in Burckhardt's view, the concept of honor provides the only counterbalance to the destructiveness of unbridled individualism.

Portion of the manuscript of Kunst der Renaissance.

In the offing [in the stories about the spiteful wit Pietro Aretino] is one of Burckhardt's most troubled points about the individualism that he is sometimes taken merely to celebrate. Emperors aspire to uniqueness. A private selfhood that adopts in metaphorical form the authority and autonomy of political imperialism will adopt its aggression as well, a chronic irritability in the vicinity of others like itself. Part of what Burckhardt is establishing with his central contrast between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages is that representatives of the former will have a...