Learning now that this was posthumously published

This is from the last years of his life.

Remember after neech lost his marbles and was signing his letters “Dionysos” he wrote one to Burckhardt calling him “our great greatest teacher”.

So this has to be significant

Rubens in the only northern European painter who possessed a clear understanding of the antique

A lifelong art-historian, and this is the only artist he wrote a standalone book on.

Think about how lucky we are to have the internet. Back in Burckhardt’s day you usually had to go to a museum or a palace to look at paintings. Or think about how recently the record player was invented. To philosophize about them people had to “memorize” these things back in the day. So feel grateful and don’t take it all for granted. Also, you think your local library is going to have this Burckhardt book? I highly doubt it.

We can learn from this legend

People of today paint for the Kike of Mantau. No wonder you see so much sickliness. The “utmost freedom”- that’s alien to them.

Anyway, this is the kind of book video game designers should be studying wink wink.

Lots of religious paintings are mused upon though, so I’m not sure if the sulfurous hell-spawns will instinctively hiss and shrivel away at the sound of it.

Secularists (of whom I count pagan immanentists among) are incapable of “appreciating” fine art in general because that’s a form of worship of the divine. It should scare you into silence like thunder, and make you humble.

As a telling emblem, someone tried to assassinate Rubens.

Remember Rubens was the visual equivalent of his contemporary Descartes of being a “symptom” of the dawn of the western self

He met with kings and other royals across Europe. And–speaking of symptoms–one of them was Charles I.

Bah! It only allowed me a 1 hour preview of this book.

I feel like discussing Burckhardt in general

Restorations, however well meant, and however much they seem to offer the only way out, cannot hide the fact that the nineteenth century began with a tabula rasa in relation to everything.

He’s one of those types that blames everything on the French Revolution. He thought it continued to shape the conscience and feeling for justice of present-day people in ways they cannot escape. Probably a reason why you don’t care much for Rubens.

almost all European people have had what might be called the historical ground pulled from under their feet… The complete negation in the state, church, art and life

He has books on the ancient Greek, renaissance Italy, and the age of Constantine, as well as books on history in general. So he knew what Europe was like prior to the tabula rasa-fication.

For him, the tabula rasa-fication didn’t just happen one time- it’s perpetual. The modernity set in motion by the French Revolution is a “never-ending revision”.

We see this with the left’s demonization of many “backward” 19th century people, many “backward” 20th century people, and even many “backward” people from the 2010s!

It’s possible to reverse the tabula rasa-fication- that’s why you find me here studying a 19th century text on a 17th century artist.

When culture is a blank slate it doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Rather, social engineers “color” the slate. And let’s just say the ones doing the coloring today are no Rubens.

So we can recolor it ourselves to some extent, by immersing in pre-revolutionary Europe. Or like I’ve said, even Confucius is much more solid coloring than what our social engineers have provided us with today.

Ain’t that the truth

Faced with such historical forces, the contemporary individual feels completely powerless … and few can overcome things spiritually.

Burckhardt rode the tiger among the ruins before Evola rode the tiger among the ruins (the latter was born some months after the former died).

Oh please

A “civic monk,” he was “pathetic” and “enfeebled by snobbery,” and led a lifestyle that was “gratuitously medieval” because he chose to live “austerely in two rooms above a baker’s shop,” and there dream about an heroic, epic past, all the while “sketching out his own Waste Land” of the nineteenth century.

There were kindred spirits to Eliot and the modernists in the century prior to theirs. Just as some of us find kindred spirits in Eliot&co in THIS century.

It’s a chain of people who somehow keep avoiding the guillotine.

“You haven’t avoided that, sorry!” Well, sort of true. But here you are reading me, also.

Zooming out, one could say the neechmeister “cribbed” his theories about history and genealogy from Burckhardt. He just extrapolated from and systematized Burckhardt’s Greek and renaissance studies. Neech doesn’t go into much detail about these times, mostly just praising them, whereas if you want the “full experience” of genealogy I’d say to check out the hundreds of pages Burckhardt has written.