Postscript: charismatic things and social transaction in Renaissance Italy

In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt published his view, still influential today, of an artful, urban Italian Renaissance that launched Europe on its passage to modernity. A lively revisionary scholarship has challenged Burckhardt on many points, but his famous formulae still resonate: the state as work of art; the development of the individual; the discovery of the world and of man. Although we now know that Italy did not alone invent the new age, it was for many years a trendsetter, especially in the domains of cultural production at the centre of this collection of essays. Republican and princely polities alike framed these developments, but, whoever ruled, Italy's unusually intense urbanization (paired with that in another well-spring of culture in the Low Countries) fostered innovation. In Renaissance cities, people and groups invested heavily in special actions, objects and places – charismatic cultural products empowered by holiness, beauty, fame and ingenuity – that fortified solidarity and resilience in uncertain times. This essay collection addresses a conjunction of urban culture and society distinctive to Renaissance Italy: an array of encounters of artifacts with ways of living in community.