Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (Basel, May 25, 1818 Ð August 8, 1897 in Basel) was a historian of art and culture, and an influential figure in the historiography of each field. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history,albeit in a form very different from how cultural history is conceived and studied in academia today. Siegfried Giedion described Burckhardt’s achievement in the following terms: “The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well.This is his best-known work, written in 1860.