"Learned Italian things" : W. B. Yeats and Italian Renaissance aesthetics

Abstract

This essay deals with W.B. Yeats's fascination with Renaissance Italy which he eventually appropriated as a model for the Irish literary revival and the harmonization of Unity of Culture in the coalescing of religious, aesthetic and practical life. Yeats found inspiration in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, especially the fourth section of this manual of courtly accomplishments which contained Pietro Bembo's exposition of physical and aesthetic beauty. This book enabled him to construct other versions of himself, a sort of histrionic self fashioning in his endeavor to "re-make" himself. The essay will also focus on Yeats's abiding interest in Renaissance art, especially the paintings of Mantegna and Titian, and the influence of these artists on the composition of his later poetry. In his appropriation of the Renaissance, Yeats was consciously aligning himself with the "pagan" aesthetics of Pater while repudiating the moralistic tenets of Ruskin and Arnold.