The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the Renaissance and touch what I think are the chief points in that complex many-sided movement. (Excerpt from Preface)

I]n the streets of Milan... moved a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew there. It was a life of brilliant sins and exquisite amusements... -from "Leonard Da Vinci" With his thoughtful sensibility and appreciation of the artistic experience, Walter Pater exerted a dramatic influence over the Aesthetics of the mid to late 19th century: a movement of creative intellectuals, from writer Oscar Wilder to painter James McNeill Whistler, who held that art should be sensual and...

Through his highly idiosyncratic readings of some of the finest paintings, sculptures, and poems of the French and Italian Renaissance, Walter Pater in Studies in the History of the Renaissance redefined the practice of criticism as an impressionistic, almost erotic exploration of the critic's aesthetic responses. Pater's infamous "Conclusion," which forever linked him with the decadent movement, scandalized many with its insistence on making pleasure the sole motive of life, even as it charmed fellow aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde. This edition of Studies reproduces the text of the first...

An annotated edition of selected essays by the major Victorian writer and aesthete Walter Pater.