What do I know about Renaissance? I know of the Medici family, the development of individuality, the cruelty of despotisms, a little bit about astrology, the love of nature, the invention of mechanical clock and hourglass, the beginning of atheism, something about the monks, something about literature, including Dante, Boccaccio, and Pulci, and literature preceding visual art.
Burkhardt did not write a lot about visual art. Rather, he drew a large picture of the cultural and political milieu in Renaissance Italy, in a discursive rather than dialectic way. He proposed that changes of numerous facets of socio-cultural circumstances is interdependent with each other, and are the causes of the evolution reflected in visual art.
