When the aged connoisseur, art critic, historian, and man of letters Bernard Berenson took up Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean during World War II, it was to re-read the novel for the eighth time. As Berenson said in his Sketch for a Self-Portrait, written in these years and published in 1949: “The genius who revealed to me what from childhood I had been instinctively tending toward was Walter Pater in his Marius, his Imaginary Portraits, his Emerald Uthwart, his Demeter. It is for that I have loved him since youth and shall be grateful to him even to the House of Hades, where, in the words of Nausicaa to Odysseus, ‘I shall hail him as a god.’” As a young man Berenson had observed that “art teaches us not only what to see, but what to be,” and from Pater’s art Berenson learned to be an Edwardian Marius. He shared with Marius a native “capacity of the eye,” a “love of beauty”; and, aspiring to Marius’s “visionary idealism of the villa,” he eventually re-created this ideal world at his Villa I Tatti.

Berenson might well have added another book to the list of Pater’s works that he mentions in his Sketch for a Self-Portrait. He wrote from Europe in 1888 to his patroness Mrs. Gardner, “Many a midnight, in coming home, I took up the Renaissanceand read it from cover to cover.” First published in 1873, Pater’s book was reprinted,