Jackob Burckhardt and the Religion of Art

More or less since the middle of the 18th century, there appeared a conviction that the experience of a work of art, if suitably prepared and separated off from other types of experience, may, thanks to its intensity and exclusivity as well as its totality, match or even supplant a religious experience. This process of sky-high adoration of art and the apotheosis of art as the highest form of cognition, reaches out with its roots to Shaftesbury’s aesthetics; whereas thanks to Winckelmann and his successors, it became deeply rooted in the 18–19 century culture, contributing to the rise of aesthetically-tinged anthropology, if only within the concept of the so called „beautiful man” in Germany at the turn of the century (Schiller, Goethe). The myth of the religion of art, which was so readily nurtured by the Romantics, was also incorporated by them into various historiosophic conceptions as well as dreams about a perfect language of art which is able to express directly the personality of the artist and his characteristic way of cognizing the world. In the second half of the 19th century, Jacob Burckhardt, one of the most original historians of culture and art, wished to base his conception of historical cognition and a historian’s freedom, among others, on the idea of communing with works of art. And although Burckhardt seemed at times to allude to the Romantic ideas of the religion of art, in point of fact, he never accepted its fundamental assumptions. The present article indicates the ambiguity of the very idea of the „religion of art” as well as to Burckhardt’s ambivalent reactions to its consequences.

More or less since the middle of the 18th century, there appeared a conviction that the experience of a work of art, if suitably prepared and separated off from other types of experience, may, thanks to its intensity and exclusivity as well as its totality, match or even supplant a religious experience. This process of sky-high adoration of art and the apotheosis of art as the highest form of cognition, reaches out with its roots to Shaftesbury’s aesthetics; whereas thanks to Winckelmann and his successors, it became deeply rooted in the 18–19 century culture, contributing to the rise of aesthetically-tinged anthropology, if only within the concept of the so called „beautiful man” in Germany at the turn of the century (Schiller, Goethe). The myth of the religion of art, which was so readily nurtured by the Romantics, was also incorporated by them into various historiosophic conceptions as well as dreams about a perfect language of art which is able to express directly the personality of the artist and his characteristic way of cognizing the world. In the second half of the 19th century, Jacob Burckhardt, one of the most original historians of culture and art, wished to base his conception of historical cognition and a historian’s freedom, among others, on the idea of communing with works of art. And although Burckhardt seemed at times to allude to the Romantic ideas of the religion of art, in point of fact, he never accepted its fundamental assumptions. The present article indicates the ambiguity of the very idea of the „religion of art” as well as to Burckhardt’s ambivalent reactions to its consequences.