Pater's graceful essays discuss the achievements of Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and other artists. The book concludes with an uncompromising advocacy of hedonism, urging readers to experience
Walter Pater (1839–94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900–1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. It comprises eight volumes with an additional volume of critical essays first published in The Guardian. The Renaissance, first published as Studies in the Renaissance (1873), is Pater's best known work. These essays on Italian art and the wider question of how the Renaissance may be defined had previously been published as articles, but Pater edited and polished them for this collection. They epitomise what Pater's literary executor called his 'literary grace' and the 'depth and seriousness of his studies'. This version includes the notorious conclusion, withdrawn from the second edition because of the negative attention its homoerotic theme attracted.
