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Aestheticism
Last decades of XIX century
• Ruskin had emphasized the importance of Art and
Beauty as a means of moral progress.
• The Pre-Raphaelites had also worshipped beauty above
everything.
• The Oxford university professor Walter Pater, in his
essays published in 1867–68, stated that life had to be
lived intensely, following an ideal of beauty.
• Therefore it was quite easy for the painter James McNeill
Whistler to introduce the French doctrine of “Art for
Art’s sake” into England.
• This doctrine placed the artist’s activity outside and
above morals and led to the beginning of English literary
Aestheticism, which can be defined as....
• a reaction against any utilitarian or moral conception of
Art .
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“Art for Art’s sake” meant:
art for the pleasure and sensations that it could produce,
without any regard to standards of morality or utility.
The fundamental principles of this movement were the
following:
The cult of beauty.
The choice for a life beyond common morality.
The solution of the dichotomy between senses and spirit
through the theory of the spiritualization of the senses.
The reversal of the principle of art imitating life into that of
life imitating art.
Walter Pater (1839-1894)
• Pater was the defender of hedonism, a doctrine according to which ...
• pleasure is the chief good to be pursued by man, i.e. the end of all
human actions.
• In his opinion , life should be treated in the spirit of art, i.e. life as a
work of art.
• In his “Studies in the history of Renaissance”(1873) he stated that:
1. “the secret of happiness lies in the enjoyment of beauty”;
2. “the finest sensations are to be found in art”;
3. “the deepest and noblest emotions can be experienced in a life
meant as a work of art.”
• Through our senses we can enjoy any form of artistic beauty and thus
live a deep spiritual experience.
• This is particularly true if we live our life as if it were a work of art.
• These ideas made him a sort of ascetic hedonist.