May 25, 1818

Jacob Burckhardt (May 25, 1818 to August 8, 1897) was a Swiss historian whose most famous work concentrated on Italian art and culture. Burckhardt, the author of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) did not just tell the story of the Renaissance. Burckhard invented the label Renaissance for such an era, and in writing a 500 page book to say what he meant, he also invented that era: one of man's growth of individuality. He was aware of this, though readers soon forgot. As he says at the start, "The State is a Work of Art", and what he meant was not just that others could come to different conclusions with the same material, but that they could all be true.

In this volume Burkhardt also wants to defend the dearth of scientific discoveries on the part of the Italians, and so he includes menageries as something contributed by the Italians to science. Here is what he says about collections of animals in Renaissance Italy:

The collections, too, of foreign animals not only gratified curiosity, but served also the higher purposes of observation. The facility of transport from the southern and eastern harbours of the Mediterranean and the mildness of the Italian climate, made it practicable to buy the largest animals of the south, or to accept them as presents from the Sultans. The cities and princes were especially anxious to keep live lions, even when the lion was not, as in Florence, the emblem of the state. The lions' den was generally in or near the government palace, as in Perugia and Florence; in Rome, it lay on the slope of the Capitol. The beasts sometimes served as executioners of political judgments, and no doubt, apart from this, they kept alive a certain terror in the popular mind. Their condition was also held to be ominous of good or evil....

We used the 1904 translation by S. G. C. Middlemore for the quote above.  Today we have Burckhardt's renaissance, but it is not completely his fault.