The exhibition “Europe in the Renaissance,” which marked the opening of a new annex in the recently renovated Landesmuseum Zurich (formerly the Swiss National Museum), fulfills multiple functions. Besides making a turbulent and contradictory epoch tangible for a broader public, it pays homage to the Swiss historian and art historian Jakob Burckhardt, who published Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien in 1860. This book—which appeared, coincidentally, around the same time the building that now houses the Landesmuseum was built—formulated some of the basic theses about the Renaissance still discussed today.Footnote ¹

The somewhat cultish relationship to Burckhardt reveals itself at once in the first room of the exhibition: here one can marvel at his original writing desk and at a draft of a lecture with drawings by the master's own hand, presented like relics in a glass case on an elevated pedestal. In fact, the exhibition and catalogue understand themselves to be, in part, “carried by the spirit of Burckhardt” (exhibition catalogue, 91). Or, as curator Bernd Roeck claims in one of his recent publications, “An Epoch Made in Switzerland,” the Renaissance era as such is “basically the invention of a Swiss historian.”Footnote ² This is a slight exaggeration: the term had already been used in 1855 by Jules Michelet, who dedicated to it one of the volumes of his Histoire de France. Yet, as Achatz von Müller emphasizes in the exhibition catalogue, the term Renaissance itself was first developed by Burckhardt when describing a work of art in Lugano, Switzerland: “the most beautiful building of the city is the front of San Lorenzo … even the doorjambs are decorated richly in the most precious Renaissance style,” Burckhardt wrote in 1839 in the journal Der Wanderer in der Schweiz (81).

Another goal of the exhibition is to pay homage to a glorious epoch of Swiss history—which, of course, did not simply arise out of thin air, as Achatz von Müller stresses: “significant contacts with the European powers, conflicts, and processes … by no means [suddenly] transformed a cultureless and backward peasant country into a significant region of European civilization. The Swiss Confederation was no Alpine Scottish Highland” (82). The Renaissance era in Switzerland—the time when Swiss urban centers such as Basel, Bern, and Zurich gained international significance—is thus a main focus of the exhibition and of its catalogue. To that extent, this is an opening event worthy of the occasion marking the unveiling of the new annex.

Denise Tonella and Bernd Roeck, a professor of early modern and Swiss national history at the University of Zurich, jointly curated the exhibition. The latter is one of the most renowned proponents of the “iconic turn” in historical writing in the German-speaking scholarly community and the author of several publications about the Renaissance, including Die Nase Italiens: Federico da Montefeltro, Herzog von Montefeltro (together with Andreas Tönnesmann, 2005) and Gelehrte Künstler: Maler, Bildhauer und Architekten der Renaissance über Kunst (2013). As we shall see, the latter publication is, in several respects, a predecessor of the essential ideas presented in the exhibition Roeck has now curated. The subtitle of the exhibition is “Metamorphoses, 1400–1600,” and the exhibition leaflet offers some initial answers to important questions about the basic idea of the exhibition and its approach, how it delineates its subject, and how it defines the local and temporal boundaries of the Renaissance. This is important, given that the term itself has been the source of much controversy, especially in recent research.Footnote ³ As the leaflet explains:

Does the exhibition make good on this claim? As Peter Burke indicates in the catalogue's introductory essay, “Renaissance and Renaissances,” the term used to describe this epoch has not yet been satisfactorily defined, either temporally or geographically. In fact, many different dates and time periods are still used to define this era. Furthermore, the characterization of the Renaissance as a purely European phenomenon is also no longer commonly accepted. Recent research criticizes the dated Eurocentrism of previous historiography, emphasizing the exchange with and influx of ideas from cultures outside of the European center, especially from Asia and the Middle East.Footnote ⁴ The global exchange of ideas and knowledge, promoted by long-distance trade along East–West trade routes (e.g., the Silk and Incense Roads), had existed since antiquity. Europe owed a great deal to non-European scientists and scholars, who were far ahead of their European counterparts in some areas, especially in medicine and the natural sciences.

The geographical boundaries of the Renaissance are not explicitly defined, either in the exhibition itself or in the catalogue, but the concept of the exhibition seems to focus on and limit its subject to Central and Western Europe—a suspicion Roeck's previous publication, Gelehrte Künstler, seems to support:

After specifying the requirements and factors that prepared and gave rise to the Renaissance phenomenon, Roeck remarks that “all these conditions were met not during a short phase but over a long period of time. They marked the beginning of modern Europe and established the economic and political hegemony that Europe achieved until the nineteenth century.”Footnote ⁶ It is worth noting, in this context, the similarity of one of the book's chapter headings, “Outlines of a World Culture—Requirements of the European Miracle,” to the catalogue's “Contours of a World Culture—Requirements of a World Culture.”

In the catalogue and also in the texts accompanying the exhibition (which he also wrote), Roeck further speaks of an “Italian Leitkultur (leading culture)” in the Renaissance era—for example, “The Italian Leitkultur that went through a colorful late bloom in Florence, Venice, or Rome shaped the face of Europe in the sixteenth century” (246). The use of the term Leitkultur—a favorite term of German conservatives in discussions about how the integration of foreigners should proceed—deserves to be noted in this context as well. Does it mean that Italian culture was supposedly superior, despite everything it owed to influences outside Italy and even outside Europe? Was Italian culture really a superior model for everyone else to emulate, or had there instead been an exchange of knowledge and ideas that, in turn, had an effect on Italy as well? One thinks, for instance, of the reciprocal relationship between Dutch and Italian panel painting. In short, Leitkultur is an antiquated concept that contradicts the characterization of the Renaissance in the exhibition leaflet as “a culture of dialogue stretching over great geographical and temporal distances.” There are other such inconsistencies between the exhibition itself and some of the essays in the catalogue. In one essay, for example, Bernhard Aikema contradicts the idea of an italian Leitkultur, preferring to speak of different regional expressions of the Renaissance style without submitting them to a hierarchical concept or using freighted terms like center and periphery.

The contributions to the catalogue are grouped into four thematic areas. The preconditions for the Renaissance are examined in the first section, “Contours of a World Culture.” Following Peter Burke's discussion of the term Renaissance, which argues that it denotes not only the European Renaissance that began in Italy but also a phenomenon that affected regions outside of Europe, curator Roeck tries to illuminate the “Preconditions of a World Culture.” He identifies the following factors as relevant for the genesis of Renaissance culture: the existence of a rich heritage of antique literature and science that incorporated the knowledge of the Orient; the lines of tradition from Byzantium, Baghdad, and Cairo, as well as from the Arabic cities in Andalusia (e.g., Cordoba), which had been important centers of learning; population growth, the development of modern banking and finance systems, and increased trade, which all contributed to the creation of a solid material basis; as well as the founding of the first universities in the twelfth century and the revitalization of law studies, which created the foundations for learning and subsequent scientific progress. Roeck also emphasizes the beginning of competition, not only among individuals in an open society, which permitted upward mobility, but also among striving cities, city-states, and states that introduced new forms of self-presentation and representation.

Nicolette Mout's essay explores the development of Renaissance humanism, the Europe-wide movement that started in Italy based on medieval traditions consisting of disciplines such as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. The occupation with antique texts increasingly available in recent Latin translations was not restricted to philologists, but was also of interest to other professions, such as physicians, lawyers, and merchants. Their ideas were often inseparably linked to educational ideas based on antique moral philosophy. Heinz Schilling devotes his essay to the “new worldliness of faith,” which found artistic expression in its portrayal of the tension between the great programmatic projects of Renaissance popes, such as the Stanze by Raphael, and works close to the different Reformation movements, such as the Four Apostles by Albrecht Dürer, an early adherent of Martin Luther, and Reformation paintings by Lucas Cranach, which took up Luther's “Solo Christus” theology.

The next section, “News about Renewal,” consists of three essays exploring the inventions and discoveries that revolutionized the era. Urs B. Leu dedicates his essay to the development of printing in Europe and its consequences. As is well known, the invention of printing with movable type by Johannes Gutenberg about 1450 had far-reaching consequences, making possible the production of thousands of copies of a text in a very short period of time, and thus changed the media landscape. The production of books and pamphlets was thus enormously accelerated, the distribution of knowledge greatly facilitated, and scientific exchange and progress sped up. Prerequisites for these innovations were, of course, the invention of paper in China and the development of Chinese and Arabian wood-plate printing.

The so-called discovery of the “New World” and its profound consequences are the subject of Felipe Fernandez-Armestos's essay in this section. Christopher Columbus's discovery of transatlantic trade and conquest routes, together with earlier expeditions in the 1480s and 1490s, contributed to the extension of European seafaring to Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean. His expeditions introduced an age of cultural and biotic exchange to an extent that had never before been achieved. The so-called Columbian Exchange connected life forms on different continents, but this also brought certain disadvantages: plagues spread worldwide, and “the exploration and exploitation of new frontiers evoked an illusion of abundance that led to ecological overkill” (58). From this point on, texts and objects of the European Renaissance reached the farthest regions of Asia, Africa, as well as North and South America, and led to a global movement of styles, artistic patterns, and ideas.

Toby E. Huff's essay, dedicated to the “Birth of Modern Science,” discusses the requirements of modern sciences: the creation of the European university system and a new rationality that had its roots in antiquity, especially in Aristotle and in texts from the Near East, which led to the development of new scientific ethics (e.g., empiricism and a critical examination of scholarly traditions and assumptions) and to an increased interest in natural science. These were the conditions that allowed for the Copernican revolution of the image of the world and for extraordinary progress in the fields of medicine and natural science.

A further group of essays focuses on the art of the Renaissance, the Renaissance in Switzerland, and the culture of everyday life. Bernhard Aikema points out that Classicism and anthropocentrism led to a paradigm shift in the arts, even if one cannot simply speak of a centrifugal diffusion of the Renaissance from Florence to the periphery of Europe. The migration and transformation of various stylistic elements (i.e., forms and patterns) from Italy to other regions led instead to a multitude of stylistic mixtures and regional expressions with their own particular authenticity and a legitimacy equivalent to Italian art. Aikema mentions several examples of artistic mixtures between classic and gothic style that can be found, among other regions like northern Germany and Poland, in Hungary and Bohemia. Achatz von Müller refers in his contribution to the importance of Switzerland in the Renaissance: Bern and Basel became important centers of the Reformation, and the Council of Basel (1431) resulted in significant progress for the region. The subsequent foundation of universities in Basel and Zurich, as well as the opening of printing workshops and paper mills in all three cities, made them important publishing sites and centers of scholarship. Basel, for instance, had not only been the domicile of Erasmus of Rotterdam but also the place where some of his important works were published. As Caroline Champell's essay shows, the Renaissance found its way into the culture of everyday life and into the living space of the wealthy bourgeoisie, as many works of art and arts-and-crafts objects from the period make abundantly clear. Finally, the essays by Patrizia Castelli and Robert Muchembled illuminate the “dark side” of the Renaissance: scientific progress notwithstanding, occultism, magic, and superstition flourished, and this was a time that saw a peak in witch-hunting in Europe. Astrology and astronomy were still inextricably intertwined as well. The Renaissance was also an epoch characterized by famines, plagues, and violence, as well as by religious fanaticism and, consequently, by brutal religious wars.

The concept underlying the exhibition is an encyclopedic and narrative, not problem-oriented, approach. The wealth of exhibits, ranging from objects of everyday life to scientific instruments, prints, books, and works of art, grouped according to certain thematic areas, aims to present the cosmos of the epoch in a comprehensive fashion. Its inventions and innovations, as well as its culture of everyday life, art, and living space are all represented. Yet, the concept of the exhibition as a whole, including the accompanying texts, do not always correspond to the insights offered by the essays in the catalogue; in fact, they sometimes diverge substantially—for example, as already noted, on the subject of art.

The narrative of the exhibition develops as follows: the first room, titled “Stage of the Renaissance,” presents a plethora of objects. Alongside Burckhardt's writing desk are objects that illuminate the preconditions of the Renaissance: one of Justinian's legal texts next to a fiorino d'oro (an Italian gold coin in circulation in northern Renaissance Italy), for example, a treatise about the abacus, and a file from the Datini warehouse that illustrates the new method of accounting. The brief accompanying texts sometimes enable the visitor to make sense of the heterogeneous exhibits on display. This becomes more difficult in certain cases, however: a book of hours, a tapestry modeled after Oriental templates, a print with a portrait of Sultan Suleiman, and a depiction of the siege of Constantinople. These exhibits, each of them interesting in themselves, are not presented in their larger historical contexts. For example, the competition and threat posed by the Ottoman Empire are mentioned in small asides in the explanatory texts, but, following the stated concept of curator Bernd Roeck, the scope of the exhibition is limited implicitly to Central and Western Europe—to the exclusion of the Islamic world. Further areas of interest—such as the reception of antiquity, innovations in Renaissance art, book printing, the emergence of a new view of humanity in art, literature, and philosophy, the discovery of new continents and regions, scientific discoveries in astronomy, the natural sciences, and medicine, the phenomenon of a Europe-wide art of the Renaissance, the Swiss Renaissance, and the culture of everyday life—are all illustrated by a wealth of material and a number of impressive pieces, yet, for the most part, in the same cumulative manner. In other words, an overwhelming number and variety of objects are on display but there is no clear sense of didactic choice or a focus on specific questions.

In the section dedicated to the visual arts, for example, which is titled “Revolution of Pictures,” it would have been interesting to show the development from early Italian panel painting to painting during the High Renaissance, and to work out the peculiar characteristics and innovations of these developments: the invention of central perspective, the new naturalism and richness of detail inspired by the Netherlands, the imitation of antique forms, the choice of topics from antique mythology, the new importance of portraits, the use of art for representation and political propaganda, as well as intensive theoretical analysis of proportions and perspective. Instead this part of the exhibition presents a more or less arbitrary selection of works, some of which are also presented in another section on the “European Renaissance.” But even there they are not used to illustrate the artistic exchange of motifs and models beyond political borders.

Another shortcoming is the absence of any visualization of the phenomenon of culture and knowledge transfer. There are nevertheless some interesting exhibits, such as a Swiss wool embroidery that resembles an Oriental carpet but is decorated with the coat of arms of a Swiss family. The accompanying description casually informs the visitor that the family's participation in the crusades accounts for the Oriental motif. A majolica whose subject is a Turkish horseman is similarly presented without any text explaining the broader context. In general, then, the subjects of culture and knowledge transfer come off badly, and the exhibit fails to address the tensions and exchanges with the powerful Ottoman Empire during this epoch (the well-known Renaissance artist Bellini even made a portrait of Suleiman), or to consider the European “fringes,” such as Poland or Hungary.Footnote ⁷ The phenomenon of East–West culture transfer is ignored as well with regard to the science and theory of arts—despite the fact that recent research has shown that the influence of Arabian science (especially in the field of optics) on the development of a central perspective in European painting had existed for some time before the Renaissance.Footnote ⁸ The contribution of Arabian medicine to the progress of the European art of healing is similarly neglected. According to recent research, Vesalius's advances with respect to scientific method and thinking were significantly shaped by Arabian texts, especially those by the physician al-Rhazes, whose works were published in Basel during Vesalius's life and thus likely influential for his critique of Galen.Footnote ⁹

The exhibition's claim to examine cultural exchange processes over great geographical and temporal distances, which is emphasized several times in the leaflet and in the catalogue, and is in accordance with recent research, falls woefully short. It suffers from traditional limitations on the few occasions where it is implemented, e.g., the development of Italian painting under Dutch influence. Yet, as already noted, influences from beyond Europe are rarely shown or appreciated. “Europe in the Renaissance—Metamorphoses 1400–1600” offers an admirable wealth of exhibits and has good intentions, then, but is not very innovative conceptually. But should one have expected anything different from an exhibition inspired by Jakob Burckhardt?