Perhaps I don't know enough about art history to really appreciate Pater's writing - this was hard work though, despite how short it was. ( )

Pater's Renaissance is an important contribution to the history of art for several reasons, though it is perhaps not to be classified as art history itself. In ten essays, Pater takes us through the Renaissance from what he sees as its foreshadowings in France, to the characters of Florence and the Italian Renaissane including Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Giorgione, before he ends where he started in France.
So why is this not always seen as strictly being a work of art history? Firstly the style of Pater's prose is more that of an aesthete than of a scholar; indeed he arguably set off the Aesthetic movement in Oxford in the mid Victorian period to much consternation from his peers in college. This is not a criticism - it is what makes this book memorable, quotable, and very enjoyable to read. Secondly, and this acknowledged in the books subtitle "studies in art and poetry", this is a work more about poetry, and musing on art in a poetical frame of mind, than it is about historical facts.
So why is this work important? Firstly, if we are interested in its subject matter, the Renaissance, there is much we can learn about its spirit as a phenomenon, and what separates it in a serious sense from the Gothic and the Classical. Secondly, Pater's aesthetic attitude comes through in this work, which is helpful for those wanting to understand his influence on the generations of aesthetes that were inspired by this work, from Oscar Wilde through to the Bloomsbury group. This influence was perhaps in part responsible for a move away from dry Victorian sensibilities towards more readable, sensuous prose, while retaining many of the interests that were formerly the preserve of the scholar.
As an introduction to the Renaissance this might not be the best work due to its gaps and errors in attribution of paintings that have now long since been corrected. However as a thoroughly readable work with its own unique spirit of beauty this is unlike anything else, and worth reading for this reason alone. ( )

The final chapter of this book, only a few pages long, is really all that I think I needed to know of it. Oscar Wilde loved this book and studied under Pater, but of course what spoke to me was what spoke to everyone that read it: "To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." I think I'm going to have to head over to [b:Marius the Epicurean|626363|Marius the Epicurean|Walter Pater|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1334835995s/626363.jpg|1443058] instead for more of that particular genre of singular Decadent heroes that my thesis has evolved into. ( )

Walter Pater had a passion for the Italian Renaissance, it spoke to him as something like a reassertion of paganism into the world of Christianity. He was able to see the Hellenistic world wherever he looked and he looked deep into Renaissance art to find it. [The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry is a collection of essays, originally collected together in 1873 under the title of [Studies in the History of the Renaissance] but the later edition published in 1888 has in addition his essay on the school of Giorgione, where he delves deeply into a definition for a work of art.

Like many other famous Victorian art critics Pater saw the Renaissance as an uplifting of the spirit from the dark ages of the medieval period. However he was careful to look backwards to the twelfth century and before to find the seeds for growth and his first chapter is on the early influence of France, this is followed by an essay on Pica Della Mirandola in whom Pater discovers in his writing its subject as the dignity of man:

"It helped man onward to that reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body, the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils"

It is in his essay on Sandro Botticelli that Pater launches into his ideas on the influence of Pagan images in Renaissance art, but he also does a wonderful job in describing the unique qualities of the paintings. There follows an excellent little essay on Luca Della Robbia before one of the highlights of the book is the essay on the poetry of Michelangelo. The essay title is a bit misleading because Pater talks about the 'sweetness and strength' in Michelangelo's work and it ranges over his painting and his sculpture. The following essay on Leonardo Da Vinci is equally impressive and here Pater talks about his curiosity and his desire for beauty and he tells us what he sees in the celebrated Mona Lisa. His essay on The School of Giorgione has the startling idea at it's heart that music is the most sublime form of all the arts because it unites subject and form and it is the paintings (there are only a handful in existence) of Giorgione that suggest this to him. In his essay on Joachim Du Bellay, Pater has come nearly full circle as he is back with France and the poetry of the Pleiad which takes him into the mid sixteenth century and towards the end of the Renaissance. Pater is not yet finished as two astonishing essays are still to follow the first is on the Germanart critic and archeologist: Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Pater says:

Winklemann -"As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to be conceived under one general idea, so I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female. But the beauty of art demands a higher sensibility than the beauty of nature, because the beauty of art, like tears shed at a play, gives no pain, is without life, and must be awakened and repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of culture is much more ardent in youth than in manhood, the instinct of which I am speaking must be exercised and directed to what is beautiful, before that age is reached, at which one would be afraid to confess that one had no taste for it."

His eulogy on Winckelmann leads Pater to discuss in detail the awakening to the divine forms of antiquity that signifies to him the Renaissance. He puts many of his thoughts together in his conclusion where he celebrates the quest for beauty in the artistry of the Renaissance:

"Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

These essays provide us with a Victorian art critic's view of the Renaissance by selecting key figures on which he can hang his theories and ideas. It is a celebration of the artistic genius that is paramount in these essays and they are written with a passion for the subject. They will serve as an introduction to the Renaissance, but they will be more appreciated by readers that already have some knowledge of the period. Pater is a critic that encourages his readers, by his writing, by his ideas and theories to look again at some of the great works of art, to see for himself just what he might have missed and so his essays are there to be read by all lovers of the period. A four star read. ( )

[From The Summing Up, The Literary Guild of America, 1938; ix, 24; xii, 36; xxiv, 86-87:]

But at that time [1890s] a florid prose was admired. Richness of texture was sought by means of a jewelled phrase and sentences stiff with exotic epithets: the ideal was a brocade so heavy with gold that it stood up by itself. The intelligent young read Walter Pater with enthusiasm. My common sense suggested to me that it was anaemic stuff; behind those elaborate, gracious periods I was conscious of a tired, wan personality. I was young, lusty and energetic; I wanted fresh air, action, violence, and I found it hard to breathe that dead, heavily scented atmosphere and sit in those hushed rooms in which it was indecorous to speak above a whisper.

[…]

When English prose recovered simplicity with Hazlitt, the Shelley of the letters and Charles Lamb at his best, it lost it again with De Quincey, Carlyle, Meredith and Walter Pater. It is obvious that the grand style is more striking than the plain. Indeed many people think that a style that does not attract notice is not style. They will admire Walter Pater's, but will read an essay by Matthew Arnold without giving a moment's attention to the elegance, distinction and sobriety with which he set down what he had to say.

[…]

But the two writers that It was really necessary to admire [in the 1890s] if you would be a person of culture and not a British philistine were Walter Pater and George Meredith. […] Now I know that there is a great deal of fustian in [Meredith’s] novels. But the strange thing is that, reading them again, I recapture the days when I first read them [in the 1890s]. They are rich for me now with sunny mornings and my awakening intelligence and the delicious dreams of youth, so that even as I close a novel of Meredith's, Evan Harrington for instance, and decide that its insincerity is exasperating, its snobbishness loathsome, its verbosity intolerable and I will never read another, my heart melts and I think it's grand.

On the other hand I have no such feeling about Walter Pater whom I read at the same time and with a similar excitement. No pleasant associations give him for me a merit to which he has no claim. I find him as dull as a picture of Alma Tadema. It is strange that one can ever have admired that prose. It does not flow. There is no air in it. A careful mosaic constructed by someone without great technical skill to decorate the walls of a station dining-room. Pater's attitude towards the life about him, cloistered, faintly supercilious, gentlemanly, donnish in short, repels me. Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, deprecating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room. But Walter Pater was a feeble creature: it is unnecessary to condemn him with intensity. I dislike him not for himself, but because he is an example of a type in the literary world that is common and detestable. This is the person who is filled with the conceit of culture.

[From A Writer's Notebook, Doubleday & Company, 1949, Preface, xiii-xiv]

I have heard that Walter Pater used to make abundant notes on his reading and reflection and put them into appropriate pigeonholes, and when he had enough on a certain subject, fit them together and write an essay. If this is true, it may account for the rather cramped feeling one has when one reads him. This may be why his style has neither swing nor vigour. For my part, I think to keep copious notes is an excellent practice, and I can only regret that a natural indolence has prevented me from exercising it more diligently. They cannot fail to be of service if they are used with intelligence and discretion.