... to the assumed backwardness of the Middle Ages and instead linking themselves to the glories of the Greek and Roman world, Vasari and other artists and intellectuals denied the cultural and intellectual legacy of the medieval world. Renaissance artistic culture may have wrapped itself in the mantle of antiquity, but the efflorescence of the arts which made this possible rested on less romantic and longer-term developments: the expansion of trade and industry; the concentration of power and wealth in nation- and city-states; the rising status of skilled craftsmen; and the triumph of courtly culture, where conspicuous display was the preferred form of competition. Many of the achievements of the era, therefore, may better be understood as the culmination of later medieval trends rather than as entirely new departures. By the middle decades of the 19th century, two historians-Jules Michelet of France and Jakob Burckhardt of Switzerland-had combined various perspectives in ...

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