"And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object"
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The fifteenth century, in Pater's telling, doesn’t merely like art; it worships it. The phrasing is doing double work: on the surface it’s lavish praise for the Renaissance temper, but underneath it’s a manifesto for aesthetic seriousness - an argument that art can function with the force, discipline, and social authority of religion. “Impassioned,” “ardent,” “serious” stacks intensity upon intensity, as if Pater is daring the reader to treat beauty as something other than a pastime.
His key move is the verb “consecrated.” It’s a borrowed church word pressed into secular service, implying that the era’s artistic drive was so total it sanctified the tools, subjects, and materials that art “had to” handle. That coercive little phrase - “had to” - matters: it suggests vocation rather than hobby, necessity rather than preference. Art is not decoration; it’s obligation, almost liturgy.
Context sharpens the intent. Writing as a nineteenth-century critic in a Britain still negotiating Protestant moral earnestness, Pater frames the Renaissance as a usable past: a counter-model to Victorian suspicion of sensuous experience. The subtext is a quiet provocation. If a culture once treated artistic making as quasi-sacred, why must modernity keep beauty quarantined from the serious business of life?
There’s irony, too, in the absolute sweep of “everything.” Pater’s excess is strategic: he inflates the Renaissance until it becomes an ideal pressure system, pushing his readers toward a more devotional relation to art - not necessarily pious, but focused, reverent, and unembarrassed about desire.
His key move is the verb “consecrated.” It’s a borrowed church word pressed into secular service, implying that the era’s artistic drive was so total it sanctified the tools, subjects, and materials that art “had to” handle. That coercive little phrase - “had to” - matters: it suggests vocation rather than hobby, necessity rather than preference. Art is not decoration; it’s obligation, almost liturgy.
Context sharpens the intent. Writing as a nineteenth-century critic in a Britain still negotiating Protestant moral earnestness, Pater frames the Renaissance as a usable past: a counter-model to Victorian suspicion of sensuous experience. The subtext is a quiet provocation. If a culture once treated artistic making as quasi-sacred, why must modernity keep beauty quarantined from the serious business of life?
There’s irony, too, in the absolute sweep of “everything.” Pater’s excess is strategic: he inflates the Renaissance until it becomes an ideal pressure system, pushing his readers toward a more devotional relation to art - not necessarily pious, but focused, reverent, and unembarrassed about desire.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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