During his academic years in Basel, Jakob Burckhardt was accustomed to meet the intellectual "milieu' of his city in a series of extra-university seminars and lectures. In the year 1860, when The Civilisation of Renaissance in Italy and Renaissance and Architecture in Italy were published, Burckhardt chose to entertain his sophisticated audience by discussing a quite particular and unusual subject. The topic of his lecture was three books on the goldsmith's art belonging to the Amerbach legacy. The text of Burckhardt's lecture highlights at least two main elements, both of which show his concern with the verbal representation of small, exquisitely adorned objects. He challenged the translation from the visible to linguistic world by summoning all possible syntactic and stylistic tools in order to give his descriptions the fullest and, in a certain sense, parallel dignity.