The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

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University of California Press, Sep 18, 1980 - Art - 489 pages
The Renaissance is a strikingly original and influential collection of essays in which Walker Pater gave memorable expression to an aesthetic view of life. It has never before been published in a scholarly edition. Donald L. Hill reproduces Pater's text of 1893, with a record of all verbal variations in other editions, from the early magazine versions to the Library Edition of 1910. Mr. Hill provides a full set of critical and explanatory notes on each of Pater's essays; headnotes outlining the story of its composition, publication, and reception; and an essay on the history of the book as a whole. Students of Pater and the Aesthetic Movement in England will find this new, annotated edition indispensable.

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Contents

Two Early French Stories I
1
Pico della Mirandola
23
Sandro Botticelli
39
The Poetry of Michelangelo
57
Leonardo da Vinci
77
The School of Giorgione
102
Joachim du Bellay
123
Winckelmann
141
Conclusion
186
A Pater Chronology
203
Critical and Explanatory Notes
277
Original Texts of Passages
465
Index
483
Copyright

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About the author (1980)

Walter Pater (born August4, 1839) was an Englaish essayist, critic and writer of fiction. He attended Queen's College, Oxford. His earliest work, an essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, appeared in 1866 in The Westminster Review; Pater soon became a regular contributor to a number of serious reviews, especially The Fortnightly, which published his essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Pico Della Mirandola, Botticelli, and the poetry of Michelangelo. All were included in his first, and perhaps most influential, book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873; reissued as The Renaissance, 1877). In 1885 Pater's only novel, Marius the Epicurean, appeared. Ostensibly, Marius is a historical novel, set in the time of Marcus Aurelius and tracing the philosophical development of its young protagonist and his gradual approach to Christianity. Practically, however, Marius is more a meditation of the philosophical choices that confronted Pater, or any thinker, during the late Victorian period. In light of the work's underrealized characterizations and the lack of any but intellectual action, it is difficult to justify calling it a novel in the usual sense of the term. Yet, as a highly polished prose piece, and as an argument for an austere yet intensely experienced way of life, it holds a singular place in Victorian literature. On July 30, 1894 Pater died suddenly in his Oxford home of heart failure brought on by rheumatic fever, at the age of 54. He was buried at Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.

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