[Gutenberg 4060] • The Renaissance: studies in art and poetry
![[Gutenberg 4060] • The Renaissance: studies in art and poetry](/cover/-R6QwgLIL8N9_vZr/big/[Gutenberg%204060]%20%e2%80%a2%20The%20Renaissance:%20studies%20in%20art%20and%20poetry.jpg)
- Authors
- Pater, Walter
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Tags
- renaissance , philosophy , renaissance -- italy , history , writing , art , arts , poetry
- ISBN
- 9780192835536
- Date
- 1873-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
- Size
- 0.16 MB
- Lang
- en
'To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'
*The Renaissance* (1873) at once became the touchstone for the decadent imagination for a generation of Oxford undergraduates. Pater was shocked at the reaction his book inspired: 'I wish they would not call me a hedonist, it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek.'.
The book had begun as a series of idiosyncratic, impressionistic critical essays on those artists that embodied for him the spirit of the Renaissance; by collecting them and adding his infamous Conclusion, Pater gained a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. But *The Renaissance* survives as one of the most innovative pieces of cultural criticism to emerge from the nineteenth century.