This chapter addresses Pater’s vexed relationship with the decadent movement. It asks whether Pater is a decadent writer and considers the extent to which he illustrates, is appropriated into, and resists decadence. It is organised in three sections: (1) setting out the origins and definitions of decadence, with examples from mid-nineteenth century France; (2) explaining how Pater’s Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) picked up on key features of French decadence and the ways in which the similarities were exploited by Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons; (3) addressing how decadence figures in Pater’s later works as an ethical problem, with reference to Marius the Epicurean (1885).

This chapter focuses on Pater’s short fiction, which took the form, to use Pater’s phrase, of ‘imaginary portraiture’. It positions these works in the context of Pater’s evolving imaginative writing, the publishing industry, and their influence on writers including Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. It illustrates how this concept of the imaginary portrait appears in works and titles of other contemporary authors published, like Pater, by Macmillan. It then explores the basis of Pater’s portrait stories, each of which focuses on an individual figure, usually a young male, destined for a tragic early death and set in Europe. In doing so, it provides examples from a range of works including ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ and ‘The Child in the House’.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s most famous work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, to provide an expansive context in which to understand its significance in intellectual, literary and art history. It begins by locating it: explaining the concept behind Pater’s collection of eleven essays in terms of publication history and the periodical press, and exploring the ways in which these essays combine silent citation with originality. Its sections concentrate on: (1) how and why Pater redefines the ‘renaissance’ from the ways in which it was conceived in the nineteenth century; (2) Pater’s definition of subjective aesthetic criticism, which reverses Matthew Arnold’s critical position, with particular attention to the Preface and Conclusion; (3) the centrality of desire and passion in text; (4) Pater’s subject-positioning between the ‘Old Masters’, modernity and his reader.

This introductory chapter briefly charts Pater’s difficulties and importance as a literary theorist and philosophical thinker, with directions for thinking critically about his works and life. It is organised in three sections: (1) Pater in Context outlines how Pater’s relationship with, and writing about, the late-Victorian period is singular with the period refracted through his aestheticism; (2) Pater, ‘himself’ explains the difficulties of looking for Pater in his writings; (3) Pater Today looks at his late-twentieth century critical history and Pater studies today.

This chapter asks what it was that marked the young Pater’s philosophy out as so radical and potentially dangerous in the 1870s. It addresses how his singular attitude to referencing, originality, and artistry in philosophy put him at odds with his contemporaries at Oxford. In its sections, it addresses (1) Pater’s reading of philosophy, and the importance of this reading to his intellectual development; (2) the ways in which Pater’s treatment of philosophy is part of his wider commitment to interdisciplinarity, and how his engagements with philosophers and their ideas shape diverse and perhaps unexpected aspects of his writings; and (3) the philosophical significance of Pater’s own aestheticism.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Walter Pater’s elusive personal life and his works. Addressing how the dynamics between the two have been a touchstone in criticism of Pater, it asks how we can reasonably read the autobiographical and self-reflexive dimensions of Pater’s writings. It illustrates how writers who encountered Pater – from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse – reflected on the difficulties of knowing him beneath his courteous exterior. It considers how Pater himself figured personal life of writers and artists of whom he wrote. Addressing Pater’s ‘tact’ and ‘reserve’, quoting from the unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’, it considers Oxford Hellenism and the revelation of Pater’s involvement with William Money Hardinge.

This chapter provides approaches to reading Pater’s works for their remarkable literary style, with particular attention to his essay on ‘Style’ (1889) and passages from works including ‘The Child in the House’ (1878) and the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). It begins by illustrating how Pater’s creation of atmospheres is intrinsic to his style as, to borrow his phrase, ‘a literary artist’. This style was focal in criticism of his works from very first reviews of The Renaissance. It identifies and analyses his characteristic vocabulary and its sensory effects, discussing Pater’s endeavours to locate the subjective origins of writing style in his essays before turning to analyse the unconventional phrasing that defined his sentences.

This chapter focuses on race in Pater’s works, contextualising these within the racial politics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western aesthetic discourse, especially in the work of two of Pater’s major intellectual influences, the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who profoundly shaped the cultural context of discussions of art and beauty in the West. It analyses how Pater’s writings on classical Greek sculptures and the ancient Greek god Apollo responded to this earlier cultural history, focusing on his early essay “Winckelmann” (1873) and his later short story “Apollo in Picardy” (1893). The final section examines “A Study of Dionysus” (1876) and “Denys l’Auxerrois” (1886), works where Pater portrays the wine-god, traditionally depicted as the embodiment of Oriental excess, violence, and irrationality, in a manner that affirms marginalised forms of knowledge and ways of perceiving the world associated with “Orientalised” racial groups.

This chapter illustrates how gender is integral to Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and its subversive potential. It explains that renewal and rebirth were strongly gendered concepts in the Victorian period, showing that Pater’s understanding of sex and gender form a vital basis for the aesthetic philosophy he constructs across his literary oeuvre, a basis that revolves around metaphors of pregnancy and childbirth. It then develops an examination of how Pater reworks traditional Victorian gender categories to his ideas of renaissance and aestheticism in two sections: first, it shows how Pater’s concept of the renaissance is defined by a consistent metaphor of female reproductive biology, with attention to his figures of Demeter, Persephone, and Mona Lisa; second, it shows how Pater’s male figures create aesthetic meaning for these matrilineal cycles, with attention to Plato.

This chapter focuses on Pater as a classicist, placing his writings on the classical world and mythology in the context of the changing face of classical education at his contemporary Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett. It illustrates that Pater was sympathetic to dominant understandings of the classical world, but, beginning in the mid-1870s, began to explore darker and more subversive aspects of ancient Greek culture, including the myths of Demeter and Dionysus. It provides guidance on how to read and understand Pater’s representation of the classical world, in the context of classical education at Oxford, with examples from works including ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (1880) and Plato and Platonism (1893).

A wealth of primary sources documents Vasari’s meticulous planning for his posthumous commemoration, his death, and his heirs’ execution of his final wishes. This final chapter explores Vasari’s death and the fate of his earthly remains, as well as the unique place his high altar for the Pieve occupies within the tradition of funerary monuments and chapels made by and for early modern Italian artists and architects. As the largest and principal altar of one of Arezzo’s most prestigious churches and the site of Vasari’s burial, it is nothing less than the most personal work of his long and prolific artistic career. Its alienation in the nineteenth century from the church for which it was made and nearly all of the other works with which Vasari intended it to be seen, however, has long obscured its significance.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of Arezzo’s history, particularly as it pertains to Vasari and his family, as well as that of the Pieve prior to Vasari’s interventions there. It then considers an initiative Vasari and Bishop of Arezzo Bernardetto Minerbetti devised to reconfigure the east end of Arezzo Cathedral in the 1550s that in part inspired his renovation of the Pieve. It concludes with an extended discussion of Vasari’s acquisition of patronage rights to the St. Mustiola chapel in the Pieve’s left aisle and his graphic designs for the chapel he intended to build there.

The focus of this chapter is monumental, freestanding altar Vasari built after his patronage rights shifted from the St. Mustiola chapel to the Pieve’s high chapel in 1560. Consecrated in 1564, the high altar was the first and largest of Vasari’s four chapels for the Pieve. This chapter considers its history and design and materiality and precedents, as well as its multiple functions as a high altar, a relic altar, a sacrament tabernacle, and, to a lesser extent, Vasari’s family funerary chapel.