Pater's graceful essays discuss the achievements of Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and other artists. included is his celebrated discussion of the Mona Lisa in a study of Da Vinci. This book concludes with an uncompromising advocacy of hedonism, urging readers to experience life as fully as possible. His cry of "art for art's sake" became the manifesto of the Aesthetic Movement, and his assessments of Renaissance art have influenced generations of readers. Oscar Wilde called this collection of essays the "holy writ of beauty."

Harold Bloom's selection of Pater's writings brings together in one volume the most important sections and passages from The Renaissance, Imaginary Portraits, Appreciations, Plato and Platonism, Greek Studies, and Sketches and Reviews, as well as "The Child in the House." Pater, the chief aesthetician and literary critic of Victorian England, brought his powerful imagination to bear on a wide range of subjects: from the drama of Euripides to the painters of the Renaissance, from the Romantic poets to the pre-Raphaelites, from Plato to Oscar Wilde. In the twentieth century,...

Walter Pater (1839 94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900 1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. It comprises eight volumes with an additional volume of critical essays first published in The Guardian. The Renaissance, first published as Studies in the Renaissance (1873), is Pater's best known work. These essays on Italian art and the wider question of how the Renaissance may be defined had...

Walter Pater (1839 94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. He brought his extensive knowledge of the history of art to bear on the new problem of how to explain the very personal affective response to beauty, and raised this into a central concern of aesthetic and philosophical thought. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900 1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. It comprises eight volumes with an additional volume of critical essays...

Walter Pater (1839 94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and aesthetic experience. He brought his knowledge of the history of art to bear on the new problem of how to explain the very personal affective response to beauty, and raised this into a central concern of aesthetic and philosophical thought. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900 1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. It comprises eight volumes of his major works with an additional volume of critical...

Walter Pater (1839 94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. He brought his extensive knowledge of the history of art to bear on the new problem of how to explain the very personal affective response to beauty, and raised this into a central concern of aesthetic and philosophical thought. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900 1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. This collection of essays, first published in 1889, was Pater's only...