The Renaissance by Walter Horatio Pater
<< Return to Title Details & Download1
THE RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY WALTER HORATIO PATER
London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)
CONTENTS
Preface: vii-xv
Two Early French Stories: 1 -29
Pico della Mirandola: 30-49
Sandro Botticelli: 50-62
Luca della Robbia: 63-72
The Poetry of Michelangelo: 73-97
Leonardo da Vinci: 98-129
The School of Giorgione: 130-154
Joachim du Bellay: 155-176
Winckelmann: 177-232
Conclusion: 233-end
DEDICATION
To C.L.S February 1873
PREFACE
[vii] Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that [viii] special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.
"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards s