[I]n the streets of Milan... moved a people as fantastic, changeful,
and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of all men could there be anything
poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew there. It was a
life of brilliant sins and exquisite amusements... -from "Leonard Da
Vinci" With his thoughtful sensibility and appreciation of the artistic
experience, Walter Pater exerted a dramatic influence over the
Aesthetics of the mid to late 19th century: a movement of creative
intellectuals, from writer Oscar Wilder to painter James McNeill
Whistler, who held that art should be sensual and beauty the highest
ideal. Pater's "cult of beauty" also profoundly affected 20th-century
arts, literary, and cultural criticism. Here, in a series of essays
first reprinted in 1873 from the iconoclastic journal Fortnightly
Review, Pater embraces and explores the works of Botticelli, Della
Robbia, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and others. This collection, sometimes
entitled Studies in the History of the Renaissance, is criticism as
beautiful as the art it considers. Also available from Cosimo Classics:
Pater's Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas. British essayist
and critic WALTER HORATIO PATER (1839-94) was educated at Oxford
University. He also wrote Imaginary Portraits (1887), Appreciations
(1889), and the posthumously published Greek Studies (1895).
