With his thoughtful sensibility and appreciation of the artistic experience, Walter Pater exerted a dramatic influence over the Aesthetics of the mid to late 19th century: a movement of creative intellectuals, from writer Oscar Wilder to painter James McNeill Whistler, who held that art should be sensual and beauty the highest ideal. Pater's "cult of beauty" also profoundly affected 20th-century arts, literary, and cultural criticism. Here, in a series of essays first reprinted in 1873 from the iconoclastic journal Fortnightly Review, Pater embraces and explores the works of Botticelli, Della Robbia, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and others. This collection, sometimes entitled Studies in the History of the Renaissance, is criticism as beautiful as the art it considers.

《文艺复兴》一书认为人类的物质生命由永久运动的科学进程和元素力量驱动。因为一切都是运动的混合体，我们必须通过敏锐的观察来对事物进行鉴别，从而从生活中获得更多意义。沃特·佩特通过这本书对19世纪末的审美观产生了极大的影响。他对美的狂热追求对20世纪的艺术、文学和文学批评都起到了极大的作用。王尔德等作家无一不是其美学观点的信众。