The state as a work of art

The title of the first part of Burckhardt's study. The Italian states of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries were, on his account, made rather than inherited: built by calculation, held by skill, and understood by their rulers as artefacts that could be designed.

Meant partly as indictment. A state that is a work of art is a state with an artist, and Burckhardt's Renaissance is not a comfortable place to be governed.

Why this is separate from high modernism

Burckhardt wrote in 1860 about a period four to six centuries earlier, so the disposition he describes long predates the technical confidence of high modernism. Recording it separately is what shows that statecraft-as-design is not a modern invention waiting on the tools. The tools changed what could be attempted, not the appetite for attempting it.