• Title: Studies in the History of the Renaissance
• Author: Walter Pater
• Genre/Subject: Art history
• Publisher: Amazon
• Publication Date: 1870
• Start date: 8/7/24
• Finish date: 8/13/24

Review:

I have had this one on my to-read list for almost a year now and I’m glad I finally got around to reading it. I’m interested in the 19th century Decadent Movement and this is considered one of its seminal works so it was an important read.

Walter Pater was an essayist, scholar, and art historian and this is his most read and referenced book. The main thing to understand about this book is that it goes much beyond a simple history of art and artists. If you follow this blog I recently read an excellent history of art and that was exactly that, a history of art. Pater here accomplishes something different entirely.

Pater goes beyond the history of the artists and explores the aesthetic experience of viewing art. And not in the Dan Brown way of looking for easter eggs in renaissance paintings, but rather how to look, how we experience art, how it makes us feel, how it changes us.

If that sounds like some heady stuff, oh my goodness is it ever. I had to go page by page and sometimes paragraph by paragraph to figure out what Pater was trying to say. I’m glad I did that because it was worthwhile to get a proper understanding of this extraordinary man.

One of the first things that I cottoned on to was the fact that Walter Pater was a very gay individual. In the 19th century that was a dangerous thing to be, and even more dangerous to write about it. Pater stopped well short of coming out, so to speak, but it would be plain enough to most modern readers, and likely the readers at the time too.

The aesthetic ideal that Pater espouses is summed up in one line from his conclusion: “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” I live by this rule and that’s why I have such success and happiness in my life. Do you want to go through life just fine? Good enough? Have a good enough wife, good enough kids, eat some stuff, work and do well enough, then slide into a fairly okay grave? Well I sure as fuck don’t. How was that salad at lunch? Man it was great, I grew the lettuce myself, and the tomatoes fresh from the vine, so juicy and tasty. Nowadays they have something called mindfulness and that’s part of this, but falls short of the mark. Look around you and get busy living, because from the moment you were born you are busy dying. You can’t escape that, and I believe that you shouldn’t wish it otherwise. If flowers lived forever what would be the point of watering them?

Pater was a contemporary of the other lights of the Decadent movements like Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire, men who thought and wrote dangerous things in changing times. He (and they) were not prophets or visionaries but they could see the changes coming and were embracing them rather than hiding behind the Victorian facade of uprightness and morality. This was a difficult read but a very worthwhile one.