Foundations of a modern discipline 33that culture might infuse buildings, paintings or costume,
which can in turn be read as expressions of culture, poses
two sets of problems for architectural historiography. Firstly,
how should architectural historians understand as cultural
those artefacts deemed subject to a specifi c episteme or
knowledge system, to be complete in themselves, as art? Or
those that operate beyond culture, or claim to do so? Sec-
ondly, how might they reconcile the general with the particu-
lar, to understand the strength of any given cultural force on
the production of a building, a monumental sculpture or an
individual architect’s works – that is, to see art as cultural
expression pure and simple?
Burckhardt gave a new signifi cance and an Italian specifi c-
ity to the period named by Jules Michelet in the seventh book
(1855) of his seventeen-volume Histoire de France (1835–
67): La Renaissance. Writing of architecture among his
introductory comments, Michelet cites Brunelleschi’s dome
of Santa Maria del Fiore as the fi rst instance of a Renaissance
architecture, based on reason and mathematics. Of this
moment he observes: ‘Art fi nishes, and art begins once more.’
The comparatively short-lived ‘scholastic age’ of the medieval
era gave way to rational thought, the rebirth of antiquity,
and the discoveries of the world and of man.^38 The concept
of rebirth gained institutional traction with Die Kultur der
Renaissance in Italien (1860),^39 so that when Wölffl in in
1888 came to consider the process of formal change from
Renaissance to baroque styles, the Renaissance was well
established historiographically. Importantly, Michelet and
Burckhardt regarded the Renaissance as a specifi c gift neither
of the arts, nor of rulership, but of culture as an entity and
a category in its own right, and known through its manifesta-
tions. Renaissance culture therefore formed a substrate for
the multivalent Renaissance of the arts: painting, architec-
ture, poetry and so forth.^40 Even when later historians dem-
onstrated the technological and economic underpinnings for
the intellectual and artistic developments of the fourteenth
and fi fteenth centuries, Michelet’s broad category of the
Renaissance remained the dominant historiographical frame-
work, and the twentieth-century historiography of architec-
ture among the arts continued to address the nature of
antiquity’s ‘rebirth’.