The Renaissance

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 seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own
impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The
objects with which aesthetic criticism deals--music, poetry, artistic and
accomplished forms of human life--are indeed receptacles of so many
powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many
virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging
personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it
really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or
degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and
under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original
facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of
light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for
one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions
strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them,
has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is
in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or [ix]
experience--metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical

questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or
not, of no interest to him.
The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to
do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as
powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or
less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to
explain, by analysing and reducing it to its elements. To him, the
picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, La
Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their
virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property
each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of
pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our
susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And
the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and
separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a
fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of
beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is,
and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when
he has disengaged that [x] virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some
natural element, for himself and others; and the rule for those who
would reach this end is stated with great exactness in the words of a
recent critic of Sainte-Beuve:--De se borner à connaître de près les
belles choses, et à s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en humanistes
accomplis.
What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct
abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of
temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of
beautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many
forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in