Walter Pater

Pater's graceful essays discuss the achievements of Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and other artists. included is his celebrated discussion of the Mona Lisa in a study of Da Vinci. This book concludes with an uncompromising advocacy of hedonism, urging readers to experience life as fully as possible. His cry of "art for art's sake" became the manifesto of the Aesthetic Movement, and his assessments of Renaissance art have influenced generations...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. [T]he first true and correctly proportioned presentation of Platonism that has been given to the general reader."-Paul Shorey Through his idiosyncratic presentation of Plato, Pater offers us an account of a peculiarly modern frame of mind. He converts Plato's search for a primordial and transcendent unity into a poetic evocation of a material life that is prized...

This collection of essays on ancient Greek mythology, art, and culture was posthumously published in 1895. The contents are "A Study of Dionysus: Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew," "The Bacchanals of Euripides," "The Myth of Demeter and Persephone," "Hippolytus Veiled: A Study From Euripides," "The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture," and "The Marbles of Aegina."

Published in 1889, and revised in 1890, this essay was a clarion call by Pater for art criticism based on subjective emotional, rather than moralistic, criteria. It was met with controversy, with some critics going so far as to accuse Pater of immorality and outright hedonism.

Originally published in 1878, this semi-autobiographical sketch by the eminent Victorian critic pioneered a new genre of writing: eschewing dialogue and traditional plotline, it is an impressionistic psychological portrait of a young man named Florian Deleal. It evokes the sights and sounds of the author's philistine childhood home.

This posthumous 1895 collection brings together, from many different journals and magazines, Pater's influential and wide-ranging writings. The contents include "Prosper Mérimée," "Raphael," "Pascal," "Art Notes in Northern Italy," "Notre-Dame d'Amiens," "Vézelay," "Apollo in Picardy," "The Child in the House," "Emerald Uthwart," and one of his earliest essays, "Diaphaneité," a meditation on the sensual and the moral.

Famed for his singular prose style as much as for his controversial aestheticist principles, Walter Pater (1839-1894) was one of the great essayists in a century of great essayistic writing. His first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance-one of the most original and influential texts of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement-was described by Arthur Symons as "the most beautiful book of prose in our literature," and his later work moved Vernon...