The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater
It is a very special book. Anyone who loves excellent writing must read this book. The book is a collection of essays on male artists and their art, and more importantly their friendships.
In the preface, Pater tells us about how one should approach a work of art. In simpler words, he says one must view a work of art in way that there stands nothing between the material object and the spectator; the one who looks should immerse himself completely and see how the work of object influences and shapes him, how it alters something in him and what sort of bodily sensations it produces in the onlooker. He writes; “To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of æsthetics.”
Although the book is about art history and art criticism, it is as much about artists and their unique friendships. Pater writes about the finer aspects of art criticism and gives us biographical details of the artists involved, one has to pay attention as Pater, being a university professor in Victorian England, reveals, in his own wonderfully regulated sentences, homosexuality of the artists he studies.
Right in the preface, for instance, we read an interesting remark that anyone who only responds to female beauty, but fully remains oblivious or indifferent to beauty in male figures cannot really appreciate a work of art. So the artists studied in the book are not admirer of male bodies in art, they are also drawn to them in real life as well.
Artists studied in the book belonged to a specific era except for Winckelmann. Pater clarifies this; he included Winckelmann because he really belonged with artists from the earlier period. Although Winckelmann was born in the 18th century, in his soul and sensibility he belonged elsewhere. Pater elucidates;
“I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with the studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and tendencies.”
I liked the entire book– essays, for instance, on Michaelangelo, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci– but I truly adored the chapter on Winckelmann. In a strange way, he reminds me of Genet. Since he is closer to us in time, I could feel and understand his urgency, the manner in which he wandered in Rome – in the world, far from home– pursuing art and meaning. In a way, he is responding to life, as Pater philosophizes on art criticism, in a very individual fashion, going against the tide, in his own unique and personally felt ways. His response to life is absolutely uninhibited, there is no caution, no external mediation of any sort regulating or inducing fear in him, nor does anything dissuading him from pursuing his self-chosen path. In a very subdued way, Pater suggests that Goethe's deep-seated admiration for Winckelmann has a queer dimension to it.
It is interesting to see how Pater, so cautiously, cleverly, and in a scholarly astute fashion dealt with the 'unspeakable' aspects of life and art, which later on, greatly influenced by Pater, Oscar Wilde took up and presented to the world in his brilliant and rambunctious manner, though in no way superior to Pater, to the world.
In the preface, Pater tells us about how one should approach a work of art. In simpler words, he says one must view a work of art in way that there stands nothing between the material object and the spectator; the one who looks should immerse himself completely and see how the work of object influences and shapes him, how it alters something in him and what sort of bodily sensations it produces in the onlooker. He writes; “To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of æsthetics.”
Although the book is about art history and art criticism, it is as much about artists and their unique friendships. Pater writes about the finer aspects of art criticism and gives us biographical details of the artists involved, one has to pay attention as Pater, being a university professor in Victorian England, reveals, in his own wonderfully regulated sentences, homosexuality of the artists he studies.
Right in the preface, for instance, we read an interesting remark that anyone who only responds to female beauty, but fully remains oblivious or indifferent to beauty in male figures cannot really appreciate a work of art. So the artists studied in the book are not admirer of male bodies in art, they are also drawn to them in real life as well.
Artists studied in the book belonged to a specific era except for Winckelmann. Pater clarifies this; he included Winckelmann because he really belonged with artists from the earlier period. Although Winckelmann was born in the 18th century, in his soul and sensibility he belonged elsewhere. Pater elucidates;
“I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with the studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and tendencies.”
I liked the entire book– essays, for instance, on Michaelangelo, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci– but I truly adored the chapter on Winckelmann. In a strange way, he reminds me of Genet. Since he is closer to us in time, I could feel and understand his urgency, the manner in which he wandered in Rome – in the world, far from home– pursuing art and meaning. In a way, he is responding to life, as Pater philosophizes on art criticism, in a very individual fashion, going against the tide, in his own unique and personally felt ways. His response to life is absolutely uninhibited, there is no caution, no external mediation of any sort regulating or inducing fear in him, nor does anything dissuading him from pursuing his self-chosen path. In a very subdued way, Pater suggests that Goethe's deep-seated admiration for Winckelmann has a queer dimension to it.
It is interesting to see how Pater, so cautiously, cleverly, and in a scholarly astute fashion dealt with the 'unspeakable' aspects of life and art, which later on, greatly influenced by Pater, Oscar Wilde took up and presented to the world in his brilliant and rambunctious manner, though in no way superior to Pater, to the world.
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