Winckelmann

Defining Beauty: The Paterian Yeats

“…Yeats may have culled the idea from Pater: "The eyes [of Greek statues] are wide and directionless, not fixing anything with their gaze. " 31 Pater further contends that lack of character is precisely an essential feature of archetypal art: statues are "characterless so far as character involves subjection to the accidental influences of life. " 32 In Yeats's poem, therefore, the young girls and boys of Greece are in love with the bodily perfection of the statues and undeterred by the characterless eyes:…”

“…For Pater, there is in sculpture an automatic purgation of emotion and complexity: the statue is "purged from the angry, bloodlike stain of action and passion, [and] reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the tranquil godship in him, as opposed to the restless accidents of life. " 35 Indeed, sculpture "keeps passion always below that degree of intensity at which it must necessarily be transitory. " 36 For Pater, sculpture also warrants perfect unity of being for there is no other art in which thought is so narrowly welded to form: in sculpture "the mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the spiritual motive. "…”

“…36 For Pater, sculpture also warrants perfect unity of being for there is no other art in which thought is so narrowly welded to form: in sculpture "the mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the spiritual motive. " 37 Finally, Pater, like Yeats, asserts a form of kinship between sculpture and literary composition, more particularly poetry: as Lene Østermark-Johansen notes, Pater draws "an analogy between language and the marble block. " 38 In spite of these Platonic echoes, neither Pater nor Yeats likes to articulate clearly that Plato's nous (intellect) provides the necessary pull towards archetypal unity.…”

Evolutionary Science and Aestheticism: a Survey and a Suggestion

“…Smith provides an effective summary of Allen's contributions to physiological aesthetics, which Allen helped to define and popularize in the 1870s and 1880s. In keeping with Darwin, Spencer and Pater, Allen believed that aesthetic emotion was rooted in the nervous system and the brain: this idea intrigued Wilde, as well as Vernon Lee, who wrote her own treatises on physiological aesthetics. Hilary Fraser and Carolyn Burdett have written extensively on the importance of corporeality – a materiality that Darwinian Theory supported – for aesthetic writers such as Vernon Lee, John Addington Symonds and Michael Field [Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper].…”

Elizabeth Eastlake's History of our Lord as exemplified in works of art:Theology, Art and Aesthetic Reaction

“…When Pater, in his essay on Winckelmann in 1867, called Raphael's Parnassus 'this other "City of God"' relative to the Disputa, he took his distance without mentioning an adversary from the divorce between Theology and Poetry in these works that was pronounced by Ruskin, then elaborated by Tyrwhitt a few years later. 95 Similarly, his view of Parnassus as complement of the Disputa implicitly addresses the radical disjunction Eastlake traced between sound doctrine and art in works by Michelangelo and Raphael. Yet it seems doubtful that aesthetic criticism endorsed replacement of a prevailing faith by a 'higher religion': art, according to an oft-repeated formulation that owed much to hostile criticism.…”