The Renaissance

Studies in Art and Poetry

Downloads: Under 100
Pages: 109

Read online EPUB Download Save

About this book

Walter Pater's The Renaissance is subtitled Studies in Art and Poetry, and this is the sixth edition, with a dedication to C.L.S. The preface says attempts to define beauty in the abstract have helped little, that beauty is relative, and that it should be defined in the most concrete terms possible.

One passage speaks of a Renaissance within the middle age, in the poetry of Provence and its later growth in Italy and France, and names Jean Cousin and Germain Pilon, the sculpture of Chartres and the windows of Le Mans. It tells of Abelard and Heloise at the house of a canon of Notre-Dame. Another looks at Leonardo, whose authentic works are very few but whose manner runs through other men's pictures, among them the Madonna of the Balances. A further passage sets Greek sensuousness against Christian asceticism.

Arts
Essays

About the author

Walter Pater

Walter Pater (1839 to 1894) was an English essayist and critic whose writing on art and the Renaissance made him a founding figure of the Aesthetic movement. An Oxford don, his call to burn "with a hard, gemlike flame" strongly influenced Oscar Wilde and a generation of writers.