Claims by historians that history is both an art and a science are used to avoid the rigor appropriate to the sciences and to remain blind to the imaginative innovations characteristic of modern art. (This may explain why so many plays and novels of the past century represent historians as the most deadly enemies of sensibility.) Few modern historians have approached the intellectual courage of Burckhardt's "impressionist" view of the Renaissance; yet such courage--even to contemplate the dissolution of historiography as we now know it--is required before artists and scientists will be willing to take history seriously.