Pater, Walter, Studies in the History of the Renaissance n/e (Paperback)

In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), a diffident Oxford don produced an audacious and incalculably influential defence of aestheticism. Through his highly idiosyncratic readings of some of the finest paintings, sculptures, and poems of the French and Italian Renaissance, Pater redefined the practice of criticism as an impressionistic, almost erotic exploration of the critic's aesthetic responses. At the same time, reclaiming the Hellenism that he saw as the most characteristic aspect of the Renaissance, he implicitly celebrated homoerotic friendship.