Walter Pater in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, says, “The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals – music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life-are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities” (585). The collection of critical essays, published in 1873, on the art and poetry mostly of the Italian renaissance asks readers to consider what the piece makes them feel instead of viewing objectively. In addition, he used the essays to depict life outside of Victorian principles. He wrote on Italian artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, one of the more prominent being “La Gioconda,” otherwise known as the Mona Lisa. The preface exemplifies Pater’s notion of how to define beauty and art in terms of how much people enjoy the art itself. He describes fifteenth century Italy as being a time “productive in personalities, many-sided, centralized, complete” and that people of differing ideas did not live in isolation of one another (Pater 587). Pater took great care with his writing style and vocabulary and believed intricately put together sentences of prose were just as difficult as poetry. Some have noted differences between how he wrote and how he lived such as using darker, more intense tones in writing whereas in person was quite amusing.

After publication, Pater became known for his ideas on aestheticism and the aesthetics movement. He gained a following of decadent late Victorian writers like Oscar Wilde who mentions Pater’s essays directly in De Profundis, saying, “that book which has had such strange influence over my life” (110), and later with early Modernist writers. Though his conclusion to the collection earned negative reception from more conservative sectors of the university due to its amoral and hedonistic tendencies. The second edition, renamed The Renaissance, did not include the conclusion, though Pater included the conclusion in later editions after writing Marius the Epicurean.

Works Cited:

Wilde, Oscar. De Profundis. Arcturus, 2021.

Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 10^th ed. vol. E, W.W. Norton and Company, 2018, pp. 583-591.

Further Reading:

“Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance.” British Library, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/walter-pater-studies-in-the-history-of-the-renaissance.

Morgan, Benjamin. “Aesthetic Freedom: Walter Pater and the Politics of autonomy.” ELH, vol. 77, no. 3, 2010, pp. 731-56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40963184.

Wellek, René. “Walter Pater’s Literary Theory and Criticism.” Victorian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1957, pp. 29-46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3825514.

Bendz, Ernst. “Notes on the Literary Relationship between Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 14, no. 5/6, 1912, pp. 91-127. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43339955.