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“Life-Enhancing” Aesthetics in the Fin de Siècle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2024
The fourth chapter challenges our tendency to conflate fin-de-siècle aestheticism with a pessimistic Decadence by exploring the “life-enhancing” aesthetics of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and her younger colleague, the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Steeped in Walter Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and Herbert Spencer’s progressive evolutionism, both Lee and Berenson attempted to balance their passion for Renaissance art with their equally strong commitments to scientific rationalism and (especially in Lee’s case) social amelioration. Looking at Lee’s extensive corpus of critical prose, travel writing, and fiction as well as Berenson’s early Renaissance studies, this chapter argues that their intersecting investigations into the nature of beauty culminated in Lee’s influential “psychological aesthetics”: a cross-disciplinary theory that insisted on the evolutionary value of positive aesthetic experience and thus elevated the stakes of public taste.
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