Abstract
The book asks the question, what a cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, somehow forgotten within our region, could impress a much more famous and renowned Friedrich Nietzsche with and to such an extent that Nietzsche begged for Burckhardt's attention literally until his very (spiritual) death, despite his notoriously harsh attitude towards philosophical tradition and a more or less solitary lifestyle. The first part maps a possibility of their conceptual (Gewaltmensch - Übermensch) and biographic (parallel professorships at the University of Basel) closeness.
The third chapter finds a deeper cause of Nietzsche's close relation to his Basel colleague in Burckhardt's significant influence on Nietzsche's disagreement with Richard Wagner. The second part of the book advances towards Burckhardt's method of cultural history (Kulturgeschichte), which in many aspects foreshadowed Nietzsche's genealogy and thus laid grounds for his conception of morality that should not focus on an enforcement of manners and rules, but rather pay attention to the kind of a figure of humanness that it bears upon a man and how this figure is established.
According to Burckhardt, Italian renaissance commences at the moment when self-creation was given privilege over obedience. The chief thesis of the book is: since the time that Nietzsche saw the possibility of incorporation of renaissance form of virtue (without the Moralin - virtù) and the concept of plastic force that follows from it, he made Burckhardt his model reader, i.e. the one to whom he addressed his treatises as a model for all future readers.
Jacob Burckhardt thus gains on an epochal importance, for he personifies the image of humanness that Nietzsche presupposed in each and every one who handles his books.