The "Complex, Many-Sided" Unity of The Renaissance

Walter Pater's The Renaissance presents a complex of attitudes that has continuing relevance for the present effort to redefine the "aesthetic movement." In general terms, The Renaissance is a work of aesthetics, based upon a concept of culture and animated by a moral idea. The unifying concept of The Renaissance is Pater's idea of expression—the unique and untranslatable character of art that gives the critic his special function and art its privileged role in human life. All the characteristics of expression as Pater defines them—uniqueness, unity, reduction to the moment—are present in the book's concept of culture and its moral vision. Present also is a central contradiction between the claim that art and aesthetic culture put us in touch with "the fulness of life" and the reductive and passive role they pre-suppose. Thus Winckelmann's culture achieved its expression only by severely limiting its interests and the moral ideal of "The Conclusion" rests on man's fundamental isolation. The essential consistency of The Renaissance partly accounts for its extended relevance for over forty years but its contradictions are even more interesting, for when effectively embodied in image and symbol they become, as in "The Child in The House," the central subject matter of Pater's art.