Walter Pater: The Architect of Aesthetic Criticism and the Spirit of the Renaissance

Walter Pater (1839–1894) was an English essayist, critic, and Oxford fellow. His prose, careful and musical, made him one of the most admired and most imitated writers of the Victorian age. He wrote on art, literature, and the inner life, and his belief that beauty should be met with full attention shaped the Aesthetic Movement.

Studies in the History of the Renaissance, first published in 1873 and later retitled The Renaissance, collects essays on Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and others, with a famous preface. Pater approaches painters as personalities and asks what each one reveals about his time. Readers of Michelangelo and of James McNeill Whistler will recognise the tone of an author who is more interested in impressions than in rules.

This collection contains 15 sentences from the public-domain text on Project Gutenberg, taken from the Preface and from the essays on Botticelli and on Luca della Robbia and Michelangelo. They are arranged by theme and quoted exactly as printed.

15 Quotes from Walter Pater

The Critic's Task

“‘The ages are all equal,’ says William Blake, ‘but genius is always above its age.’”

Pater opens his Preface with a line from Blake. Every period has its achievements, the quotation says, but a genius rises above the habits of his time. It is a fitting start for a book that studies great individuals, and it sets the tone for a critic who prefers persons to theories.

“The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way.”

Pater is describing earlier efforts to define beauty. The abstract definitions, he says, have usually been less useful than the passing insights found along the road. The sentence is a quiet defence of the essay form, in which observation matters more than a system.

“Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.”

For Pater, learning means a growing sensitivity. The more deeply and widely a person can respond to art and nature, the more educated he or she is. The sentence is long and careful, in his usual manner, and it states a view of education that values feeling alongside knowledge.

“He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms.”

Here Pater describes the good critic. Such a reader does not insist on a single kind of beauty but welcomes many. The sentence is plain and generous, and it is a useful corrective to any taste that is too narrow or too sure of itself.

“To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal.”

The critic, in Pater's account, does not rank an age or school above another before looking. He starts from equality and tries to understand each on its own terms. The statement is a call for open-mindedness, and it echoes the phrase from Blake with which the Preface began.

“The question he asks is always:--In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself?”

Pater says that the critic looks for the person in whom an age found its voice. The question is the method of the whole book, which proceeds by portraits. The dash and the colon are part of the printed text, and the sentence conveys his way of turning history into biography.

“He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and tendencies.”

In the Preface Pater praises one writer of the period as a late summing-up of its spirit. The sentence shows what he looks for in a figure: someone who explains an age by embodying it. It also shows his habit of describing culture in terms of ripening and fruit.

Botticelli

“In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life is almost colourless.”

Pater begins the Botticelli essay by noting how little drama there is in the painter's life. Other artists of the time had storms and quarrels, and he had few. The remark turns attention away from anecdote and toward the paintings themselves.

“Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have been a mere naturalist among them.”

Pater says that many painters of Botticelli's day were absorbed in observing nature. Botticelli might simply have joined them. The sentence prepares the contrast with what follows, in which Pater explains why he was something more than a faithful recorder of the visible world.

“But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles Dante.”

Pater compares Botticelli to Dante, the poet of a visionary journey. The painter is not content with surfaces, he says, but sees something beyond them. The odd word “visionariness” is Pater's own coinage, and it gives the sentence its distinctive flavour.

“It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and charm.”

Pater refers to the mingled sadness and sweetness he sees in Botticelli's Virgins. The sentence is a good example of his critical method: he names an impression, and then asks what in the picture gives rise to it. His readers are asked to see Botticelli as Pater did.

Michelangelo and the Inner Life

“The brooding spirit of life itself is there; and the summer may burst out in a moment.”

Pater is writing about the sculptor's early work, in which he finds potential energy held in stillness. The comparison with an approaching summer gives the stone a sense of life waiting to break out. It is typical of his habit of describing sculpture in terms of weather and season.

“No one ever expressed more truly than Michelangelo the notion of inspired sleep, of faces charged with dreams.”

Pater picks out the sleeping and dreaming figures in Michelangelo, such as those on the Medici tombs. Rest, for the sculptor, is not empty but full of inner life. The sentence is one of the most admired in the essay and invites the reader to look again at closed eyes in marble.

“He believed in dreams and omens.”

A short sentence after longer ones, which gives it more weight. Pater tells the reader that Michelangelo took visions and signs seriously, as men of his time often did. It reminds us that the artist belonged to a world of belief as well as to the history of art.

“People had not yet begun to think that what was good art for churches was not so good, or less fitted, for their own houses.”

Pater observes that, in the earlier Renaissance, fine art belonged to everyday life as well as to the church. A family could hang a sacred picture at home without any sense of conflict. The sentence points toward a time when art and daily life were closer together.

Conclusion

Pater asks his reader to look closely, to respond to the particular, and to value the person behind the picture. His sentences move slowly, but they reward attention, and the book that began as a series of essays helped to change how Victorian readers thought about the Renaissance and about art in general.

Pater died in 1894. The Preface and its companion essays have been quoted and argued over ever since, and later writers, including Oscar Wilde, took their cue from them. These fifteen sentences offer a taste of a critic who believed that attention itself could be a form of devotion.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Walter Pater?

Walter Pater (1839–1894) was an English essayist and critic and a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. He was a major influence on the Aesthetic Movement.

What is The Renaissance?

It is a collection of essays on Italian and French art and literature, first published in 1873. It includes essays on Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and others, and a well-known Preface.

What did Pater mean by looking at the individual?

He believed that the critic should ask in which person the spirit of a period found its expression. His essays are therefore portraits of artists as much as studies of works.

Which text is quoted here?

The quotations come from The Renaissance in the public-domain edition on Project Gutenberg. They are given as printed, and each belongs to the Preface or to the essays on Botticelli and on Luca della Robbia and Michelangelo.

Recommended Similar Collections on Quotyzen

• Michelangelo: The Divine Architect of the Renaissance
• James McNeill Whistler: The Architect of Aesthetic Harmony and Artistic Independence
• John Ruskin: The Architect of Truth in Art and the Honest Building

Should a critic judge a work by rules, or by the impression it leaves? Share your view in the comments below!