PROOF Contents

PROOF Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments viii Notes on Contributors ix List of Abbreviations xii Introduction The Aesthetic Life: Thinking Across the Arts and the Senses 1 Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins Part I Pater and Contemporary Visualities 1 Art and the Museum 13 Jonah Siegel 2 Pater and Contemporary Visual Art 33 J. B. Bullen 3 The ‘Necessity’ of Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters 47 Lesley J. Higgins 4 Critical Connections and Quotational Strategies: Allegory and Aestheticism in Pater and Simeon Solomon 68 Colin Cruise Part II Pater and the Dynamic Arts 5 Pater’s Auxerre Tapestry 85 Kenneth Daley 6 Sculpture, Style and Pater’s Imaginative Sense of Touch 102 Lene Østermark-Johansen 7 The Painting as Physical Object in a Verbal Portrait: Pater’s ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ and Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ 117 Norman Kelvin 8 Walter Pater, Film Theorist 135 Carolyn Williams v PROOF vi Contents 9 Pater’s Musical Imagination: The Aural Architecture of ‘The School of Giorgione’ and Marius the Epicurean 152 Elicia Clements 10 Haunted Stages: Walter Pater and the ‘Theatrical Mode of Life’ 167 Andrew Eastham Part III Pater and the Practice of Writing 11 Literary Communism: Pater and the Politics of Community 185 Matthew Potolsky 12 The Limitations of Schilleresque Self-Culture in Pater’s Individualist Aesthetics 205 Kate Hext 13 The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction 220 Laurel Brake Bibliography 232 Index 249 PROOF 1 Art and the Museum Jonah Siegel The nineteenth-century museum (Parnassus or the Disputation of the Sacrament) Between approximately 1509 and 1511, as Michelangelo completed the Sistine ceiling nearby, Raphael set to work on his first major commission in Rome, a set of frescoes for the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican. On one wall of the room he painted the fresco that would become famous as The School of Athens (Figure 1.1); on the facing wall a theological subject that has come to be called the Disputation of the Sacrament (Figure 1.2); and on a third, a vision of poetry, Parnassus (Figure 1.3), presided over by Apollo and the Muses and inhabited by the great poets of antiquity and the modern era. Raphael’s program presents a beautifully realized illustration of the various realms of achievement – divine, intellectual, and creative – given weight not only by the painter’s mastery of technique and originality of conception, but also by the location of his works in the heart of Christendom. Individually, each of the three images is an instance of those pantheons of illustrious men that fascinated the Renaissance. And yet, taken together, the set also proffers a surprisingly complex and unsettled vision of inspiration. Plato famously points up to indicate his emphasis on the ideal; Aristotle points down for the more earthly empirical school of philosophy with which he was associated. Each of the various other thinkers around them stands for a distinct approach to the problems that challenge human reason. More sur- prising than the arguments of philosophers, however, is the ‘dispute’ that faces them: the Host that forms the center of the painting across from The School of Athens is not presented simply as the culminating earthly manifes- tation of all the divinity that rises above it (the gospels, Mary and Joseph, Jesus, and ultimately God the father), it is also the center of a transhistorical debate. Indeed, the painter’s art harmonizes any number of disputes on both sides of the room, even as the program as a whole suggests the harmony of classical thought with Christian. The Parnassus links both sides, enacting as it represents the pleasure of harmonization itself. 13 PROOF 14 Figure 1.1 Raphael, The School of Athens (1510–11) Figure 1.2 Raphael, Disputa (Disputation of the Sacrament, 1509–10) PROOF Art and the Museum 15 Figure 1.3 Raphael, Parnassus (c. 1511) Like all important, but relatively recent innovations, the museum seems to call out for antecedents that will explain its history and demonstrate its actual pedigree. I begin with Raphael’s work at the Vatican because it is through discussion of the decoration of this space that Pater, following Ruskin, addresses the essential qualities of the institution in his first published essay. Broadly speaking we can say that the program of the Stanza is about the sources of inspiration and the relationship of cultural achievement to time, be it atemporality, synchronicity, or the renewal that we call tradition. The frescoes have at their heart the juxtaposition of individuals from widely divergent times and places (Homer with Dante; St Jerome with Savonarola; Plato with Socrates, but also Pythagoras and Zoroaster, and so on). Both themes – inspiration and cultural achievement in time – are at issue in Pater’s writing on the Stanza, but in order to understand what is at stake in his claims, it will be just as well to begin with the precedent that certainly underlies his own account of Raphael’s work: John Ruskin’s trou- bled reference to the space in Volume 3 of Stones of Venice (1853). The earlier critic had been exercised by a juxtaposition he identifies as being characteristic of modernity. For Ruskin, the problem is the lack of judgment, not to say hierarchy, in the visual paralleling of divine and artistic inspiration, of pagan PROOF 16 Jonah Siegel and Christian divinity. The rooms speak to Ruskin of a characteristic artistic egotism and the related loss of the ability to ascribe value he associates with the Renaissance broadly: The faculties themselves wasted away in their own treason; one by one they fell in the potter’s field; and the Raphael who seemed sent and inspired from heaven that he might paint Apostles and Prophets, sank at once into powerlessness at the feet of Apollo and the Muses. (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 11, p. 130) This melancholy evocation of the Disputa and the Parnassus emerges at the culmination of a scathing description of the decline in seriousness of painting indicated by its change in ambition from the representation of religious subjects to the representation of classical ones. Raphael of course does not worship Apollo, but that is precisely Ruskin’s concern; a culture that cele- brates idols in which it does not believe participates in the emptying-out of meaning from all representations: ‘[T]his double creed, of Christianity confessed and Paganism beloved, was worse than Paganism itself, inasmuch as it refused effective and practical belief altogether’ (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 11, p. 129).1 Ruskin is describing the beginning of the museum culture he dreads, hence his choice, from the range of pagan figures painted by Raphael, of a representation of Apollo and the Muses: the more skilful the artist, the less his subject was regarded; and the hearts of men hardened as their handling softened, until they reached a point when sacred, profane, or sensual subjects were employed, with absolute indifference, for the display of colour and execution; and grad- ually the mind of Europe congealed into that state of utter apathy, – inconceivable unless it had been witnessed, and unpardonable, unless by us, who have been infected by it, – which permits us to place the Madonna and the Aphrodite side by side in our galleries, and to pass, with the same unmoved inquiry into the manner of their handling, from a Bacchanal to a Nativity. (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 11, p. 131) Ruskin moves seamlessly from past tense to present, as in one paragraph he travels from Raphael painting muses at the Vatican to the modern mind at the museum. Pater sees something quite similar to Ruskin at the Vatican, but the fun- damentally different understanding of the breaks and continuities in culture that he brings to bear is bound to lead him to entirely different conclusions: In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raphael has commemorated the tradition of the Catholic religion. Against a space of tranquil sky, broken in upon by the beatific vision, are ranged the great personages of Christian PROOF Art and the Museum 17 history, with the Sacrament in the midst. Another fresco of Raphael in the same apartment presents a very different company, Dante alone appear- ing in both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek mythology, under a thicket of laurel, sits Apollo, with the sources of Castalia at his feet. On either side are grouped those on whom the spirit of Apollo descended, the classical and Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of Castalia come down, a river making glad this other ‘city of God’. (TR, p. 157) The sensibility behind this bald identification of another city of God is precisely the problem that alarms Ruskin. Nevertheless, it is in this other city and in the tradition for which it stands that Pater locates the continuity of culture that is his theme when he writes on Winckelmann in his very first published essay, challenging the stark divisions separating historical periods that had been so important for cultural analysis earlier in the century: In this fresco it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste, that Raphael commemorates. Winckelmann’s intellectual history authenti- cates the claims of this tradition in human culture ...This testimony to the authority of the Hellenic tradition, its fitness to satisfy some vital requirement of the intellect, which Winckelmann contributes as a soli- tary man of genius, is offered also by the general history of the mind. The spiritual forces of the past, which have prompted and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, indeed, within that culture, but with an absorbed, underground life.

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