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Sign up todayThe Renaissance
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Learn morePublished to great acclaim in 1873, Walter Pater's compendium of idiosyncratic, impressionistic essays on the Renaissance gained him a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. Oscar Wilde called it the "holy writ of beauty." It was Pater's cry of "art for art's sake" that became the manifesto for the aesthetic movement. He believed that art should be sensual and that beauty should rank as the highest ideal. Marked by elegant fluency, Pater's essays discuss Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other artists who, for him, embodied the spirit of the Renaissance. Pater's work survives to this day as one of the best pieces of cultural criticism to emerge from the nineteenth century.
This collection is criticism as beautiful as the art it considers.
Walter Pater (1839–1894) was educated at the Kings’ School, Canterbury, and at Oxford, where he was later elected a fellow of Brasenose College. His publication of The Renaissance in 1873 caused a stir within the walls of the university, as well as outside, for its positive views on hedonism. Despite controversy, he became a formative influence on the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century.
Wanda McCaddon (d. 2023) narrated well over six hundred titles for major audiobook publishers, sometimes with the pseudonym Nadia May or Donada Peters. She earned the prestigious Audio Award for best narration and numerous Earphones Awards. She was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine.
Reviews
“It is not often that we have to welcome a book like this, which brings its readers into fresh and intimate relations with remote phases of life and art, informing these with the vivid glow of a new personality…It is hard to analyze the results of analysis, and to criticize criticism. But if it is necessary to look for the secret of Mr. Pater’s success in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, it might be stated as lying in a peculiar exquisiteness, distinction, refinement, occupying itself with artistic subjects somewhat remote in character…There is a command of such a style as has not before been written, a wonderful style that sometimes threatens to overstep the limits of prose, delicate, dainty, impassioned, yet certain and chastened.”
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