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  • Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture by Lene Østermark-Johansen
  • Sebastian Lecourt (bio)
Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture, by Lene Østermark-Johansen; pp. xvii + 364. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011, £70.00, $124.95.

Lene Østermark-Johansen’s lavishly illustrated Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture assigns itself a large task: to showcase Walter Pater’s career-long meditations upon the relationships between different artistic media. The book approaches this broad topic, however, by tracing Pater’s more specific engagement with the question of sculpture, and in particular that of sculptural relief. Pater, Østermark-Johansen suggests, follows Charles Baudelaire and Leonardo da Vinci in regarding the interplay between flat surface and emergent detail as more artful than the three-dimensionality of classical sculpture—more revealing of the possible relationships between space and time, surface and depth, texture and color. Moreover, she argues, relief offers Pater a site for thinking about historicism, in the sense that it represents “stone containing a stratified accumulation of material over time,” comparable not only to the earth’s crust but also to the individual who has been built up from “the composite experience of all the ages” (4).

Thus, while Østermark-Johansen does not trumpet her book’s connections to the new formalism, her work can be seen as one of many recent attempts to bring discussions of literary form and history closer together—in this case, by reading a major Victorian author as a theorist preoccupied with the relationship between medium and historicity. In one sense, of course, her claim about the historicist dimensions of relief are simply expanding upon Carolyn Williams’s argument, in Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (1989), that relief, with its spatial compression of modern and [End Page 141] ancient, is Pater’s figure for an “achieved sense of historical difference” ([Cornell University Press], 17). Østermark-Johansen’s study distinguishes itself, however, by its diverse case-study approach, which takes us beyond a close reading of Pater’s essays and on an eclectic tour of his encounters with art history. In a clever move, the volume’s chapters proceed chronologically at two levels, tracing the development of Pater’s thought from Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) to the essays of the 1890s, but also following Pater’s engagement with different periods of aesthetic theory from the Renaissance through the late nineteenth century. Østermark-Johansen’s first chapter traces Pater’s engagement with the Renaissance paragone debate, in which relievo was invoked “as a term uniting the art forms of sculpture and painting” (16). Her second chapter explores Pater’s reading of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory and in particular the way in which Pater’s “School of Giorgione” (1877) rethinks Laocoön’s (1766) taxonomy of art media by “questioning Lessing’s ‘pregnant moment,’ defined when Lessing asserted the stasis of the visual arts and the powers of the imagination when stimulated by sight” (77).

Østermark-Johansen’s final chapters bring Pater into his contemporary moment. Her third chapter examines Pater’s encounter with French aestheticism, reading Pater as positioned halfway between Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire, between the ideals of classical, three-dimensional sculpture and the impressionistic, color-driven ethos of the painter of modern life. Chapter 4 takes the focus off Pater slightly as Østermark-Johansen creatively reads James Whistler and Edward Burne-Jones through the lens of Pater’s Renaissance, arguing that, while Whistler and Burne-Jones are often taken to stand for the opposite extremes of late nineteenth-century art, both entertain a Paterian drive to “blend the qualities of sculpture and painting”—particularly by foregrounding whiteness, whether in “the Whistlerian Symphonies in white” or “in Burne-Jones’s white-clad girls” (165). The fifth chapter positions Pater’s Greek Studies (1895) as part of a shift at Oxford away from the traditional study of classics and toward the archaeological and anthropological study of ancient Greek society—an approach that prefers being literally in touch with the materiality of a lost culture to idealizing its abstract forms. Finally, Østermark-Johansen’s sixth chapter explores the ways in which Pater uses sculptural metaphors to think about...

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