HISTORIANS from Switzerland

Top 4

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Swiss Historians of all time. This list of famous Swiss Historians is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Jacob Burckhardt (1818 - 1897)

With an HPI of 68.55, Jacob Burckhardt is the most famous Swiss Historian.  His biography has been translated into 44 different languages on wikipedia.

Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (25 May 1818 – 8 August 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. His best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history. Sigfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well."

2. Heinrich Wölfflin (1864 - 1945)

With an HPI of 63.25, Heinrich Wölfflin is the 2nd most famous Swiss Historian.  His biography has been translated into 31 different languages.

Heinrich Wölfflin (German: [ˈhaɪnʁɪç ˈvœlflɪn]; 21 June 1864 – 19 July 1945) was a Swiss art historian, esthetician and educator, whose objective classifying principles ("painterly" vs. "linear" and the like) were influential in the development of formal analysis in art history in the early 20th century. He taught at Basel, Berlin and Munich in the generation that saw German art history's rise to pre-eminence. His three most important books, still consulted, are Renaissance und Barock (1888), Die Klassische Kunst (1898, "Classic Art"), and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915, "Principles of Art History"). Wölfflin taught at Berlin University from 1901 to 1912, at Munich University from 1912 to 1924, and at University of Zurich from 1924 until his retirement.

3. Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 - 1887)

With an HPI of 62.98, Johann Jakob Bachofen is the 3rd most famous Swiss Historian.  His biography has been translated into 29 different languages.

Johann Jakob Bachofen (22 December 1815 – 25 November 1887) was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor of Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1844. Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric matriarchy, or Das Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World. Bachofen assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum. He postulated an archaic "mother-right" within the context of a primeval Matriarchal religion or Urreligion. Bachofen became an important precursor of 20th-century theories of matriarchy, such as the Old European culture postulated by Marija Gimbutas from the 1950s, and the field of feminist theology and "matriarchal studies" in 1970s feminism.

4. Florian Cajori (1859 - 1930)

With an HPI of 48.25, Florian Cajori is the 4th most famous Swiss Historian.  His biography has been translated into 19 different languages.

Florian Cajori (February 28, 1859 – August 14 or 15, 1930) was a Swiss-American historian of mathematics.