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'art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake'
In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), a diffident Oxford don produced an audacious and incalculably influential defence of aestheticism. Through his highly idiosyncratic readings of some of the finest paintings, sculptures, and poems of the French and Italian Renaissance, Pater redefined the practice of criticism as an impressionistic, almost erotic exploration of the critic's aesthetic responses. At the same time, reclaiming the Hellenism that he saw as the most characteristic aspect of the Renaissance, he implicitly celebrated homoerotic friendship.
Preface
Aucassin and Nicolette
Pico della Mirandola
Sandro Botticelli
Luca della Robbia
The Poetry of Michelangelo
Leonardo da Vinci
Joachim du Bellay
Winckelmann
Conclusion
Appendix A: The School of Giorgione
Appendix B: Diaphaneite
Description
'art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake'
In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), a diffident Oxford don produced an audacious and incalculably influential defence of aestheticism. Through his highly idiosyncratic readings of some of the finest paintings, sculptures, and poems of the French and Italian Renaissance, Pater redefined the practice of criticism as an impressionistic, almost erotic exploration of the critic's aesthetic responses. At the same time, reclaiming the Hellenism that he saw as the most characteristic aspect of the Renaissance, he implicitly celebrated homoerotic friendship.
