Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court Book

Books mark pathways. I arrived at this book from a quote encountered in Botticelli that I found very beautiful. It came from Pater's essay on Botticelli and this may remains my favourite essay from this collection.

..he is a visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandaio even, do but transcribe, with more or less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary painters.. But the genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own.



This volume is then a collection of essays published separately at different dates, from around the decade of the 1870s. When he wrote them, the subjects were not as widely treated or known as they are now. This requires a certain degree of estrangement from our own culture if one desires to bring to life the novelty of Pater's perceptions. Their freshness also helps us to be more lenient with the few errors in which he incurred.

Following the tradition of the Grand Tour, Walter Pater (1839-1894) travelled to Italy in 1865. These were years of dramatic changes in the political geography of Italy. And this requires also an effort in our imagination in trying to detach ourselves from our contemporary notions of the place. Unsurprisingly, during his visit a new passion took hold of Pater and he proceeded to devote several of his subsequent studies and writings to the Italian artists of the Renaissance.

The understanding of the Renaissance, in particular of the earlier part'the late 14C and 15C, deepened significantly during the 19C. The French historian Michelet baptised the period with its now coined term; soon the Swiss historian Burckhardt articulated its culture; the theoretician Ernest Renan expanded the geographical borders of its cultural imagination; British circles of artists called themselves in honour to the art that interested them; Ruskin echoed these artists, his friends, in the shift of emphasis on which part of the Renaissance offered the most sincere morality. It is in this trail that we have to situate Pater's lovely essays.

The essay that drew me in the path to this book was apparently the first monographic study of Botticelli in England. Even if I picked the book for its Botticelli, I have also enjoyed his study of the early French literature, with the stories of Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile and Aucassin et Nicolette. Reading Pater just after Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, who was convinced that the Renaissance could only have happened in Italy, this different focus on the French provenance of the seeds of the new way for man to understand his own place in the world, was startling. But only for a couple of seconds. After all, we know well that Provençal as well as Sicilian poetry paved the way to Dante's still nuovo.

Pater's writing on Giorgione is wonderful for its generalities and less so for its particulars. Giorgione has been a difficult artist to study given the scant documentary evidence. Pater wrote his views when it had just been decided that several works had been wrongly attributed to Giorgione. He therefore centres on the one painting, which he thinks was undoubtedly a Giorgione. Sadly, it is now thought that Titian painted it. Nonetheless, many of his meditations on aesthetics are still a riveting read.

Another of my favourites was his Pico della Mirandola. Pater digs inside the preoccupations of this intriguing personality and presents him as the epitome of the goals of the Renaissance thinker: the impossible reconciliation of the pagan antique world with the Christian religiosity.




The jewel of the crown, however, is his essay on Leonardo. Pater first pointed the finger and identified that which was non-identifiable: the elusiveness and ambiguity of La Gioconda's smile, and thereby contributing to the consecration of the most iconic of icons (.. its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it.)




Befittingly the essay itself has become an icon of Pater.


And as reading paths rarely come to a dead end, to follow on the track of Pater I can already identify several book-posts with the name of Walter Pater stamped on their spines.