Transfigured World by CAROLYN WILLIAMS

Author:CAROLYN WILLIAMS
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2016-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

6 · Low and High Relief: “Luca Della Robbia”

Toward the end of the essay on Winckelmann, Pater shifts his focus to Goethe, moving Goethe’s influential predecessor into the background. The “aim of a right criticism,” Pater concludes, is “to place Winckelmann in an intellectual perspective of which Goethe is the foreground” (R, 226). Pater’s rhetorical strategy accentuates Goethe’s relative importance, his “broad” culture as opposed to Winckelmann’s intense but narrow gift, and especially his position later in art-historical time, and it echoes Winckelmann’s own principles of evolutionary art history. Positioning Goethe in the foreground at the end of The Renaissance has the striking effect of pointing self-reflexively toward the further developments of romanticism represented by Pater himself. In these last two sections of Part Two, I want to analyze the particular forms of “intellectual perspective” that are represented by manipulating background and foreground, but before turning to Pater’s figures of relief, I shall consider his careful arrangement of the volume as a whole.1

In the “Preface,” Pater stresses both the chronological form and the spatial form of his volume. He most strenuously emphasizes the chronological, linear, and developmental plot of his story, tracing the Renaissance from early to late, beginning with the tentative emergence of humanism within the Middle Ages, and ending with the romantic, revitalized humanism of Goethe. But a spatial form of organization is also readily apparent in his concentric arrangement of essays by nationality: essays on fifteenth-century Italian art are framed by essays on French literature, then half-framed again by German philology and historical aesthetics, then, on the outermost edge, by the English tradition of criticism represented by Pater’s voice in propria persona.

Pater acknowledges the aesthetic choice involved in this concentric arrangement when he notes in the “Preface” that “Two Early French Stories,” which he has positioned as the first essay, does not necessarily provide the best example of the early Renaissance but does complete the French level of his frame. Fie includes the essay because, as he puts it, “it help[s] the unity of my series” (R, xv). His attempt to correlate this concentric arrangement of national aesthetics with his chronological plan is forced, but significant nonetheless. Pater argues that the “Two Early French Stories” demonstrate the freshness of the early period, “the charm of ascesis, of the austere and serious girding of the loins in youth,” and that the writings of Joachim du Bellay represent the “subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence” (R, xii-xiii). Though his rationalization does seem remarkably adventitious in this prefatory context, a related geographical argument for unity makes more sense at the end of the essay on Leonardo, when Pater claims that Leonardo’s last days in France open a “prospect” through which art history can view “Italian art [dying] away as a French exotic” (R, 128).2 Still fanciful in the highest degree as a historical observation, this argument tends to make geographical dislocation a metaphor for the aesthetic itself; everything with aesthetic value is “exotic,” for it has been dislocated, exiled, and translated from one context to another.

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