num_pages: 208
description: '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.
language: English
title: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
titlecomplete: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
genres: 19th Century, Essays, Classics, History, Philosophy, Art History, Criticism, Nonfiction, Art, Poetry
ratings_count: 1583
publisher: Oxford University Press