Walter Pater

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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 a 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 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 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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
• Seitenzahl: 232
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. September 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9783749483457
• Artikelnr.: 57666933

Autorenporträt

Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) was an influential English critic, essayist, and a notable figure in the Aesthetic Movement, a proponent of the pursuit of beauty and the elevation of form over content in the arts. Pater's work, particularly 'The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry,' originally published in 1873, has etched his place in the domain of literary and cultural studies. A scholar by education and profession, Pater studied at Oxford and later joined the faculty at Brasenose College, where he dedicated his life to academia and writing. In 'The Renaissance,' Pater examined the cultural movements of the 14th to 17th centuries, encapsulating his reflections on influential artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Michelangelo. Pater's writing is characterized by a highly refined and poetic prose style, and his emphasis on the subjective experience of art has had a lasting impact on aesthetic philosophy and criticism. He advocated for a life of intense and immediate experience, famously culminating in the book's conclusion with an exhortation to 'burn always with this hard, gemlike flame.' Pater's exploration of hedonism, expression, and historical analysis has continued to resonate with scholars and readers, and his work remains a seminal text in the study of Renaissance art and the development of modern aesthetic thought.