Interfaces between literature and art in the late Victorian and modern periods

Abstract

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; writes Walter Pater, 'like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps her fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants [ ... ]'. Unlike any conventional piece of aesthetic criticism, Pater's mystical interpretation of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa seems to have become one of the most memorable passages in English literature, possibly for its intricate epousal of art and literature in a context where the relationship between the two had often been neglected. Its distinctness from any traditional criticism of design and technique, its particularity of satanic imagery have embalmed the posing figure into the strips of eternity, reclaiming, in the process, an authority which stretches beyond 'the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias'. It is by no coincidence, even though Pater's passion may be 'too much concerned with the spectator's role in the aesthetic transaction' rather than the existence of the work of art per se, that his critical stance in his appreciation of the Mona Lisa, his combination of the literary and the artistic, have been chosen to inaugurate this study on the relevance of art in literature and vice versa in a milieu where different aesthetic movements interact within blending controversy.