The Victorian concept of the Italian Renaissance in Browning, Ruskin, Eliot, and Pater

The Italian Renaissance becomes a moral symbol with differing implications in works by four major Victorian writers. In The Stones of Venice, Ruskin traces the corrupt "moral spirit" of the Renaissance in Venetian architecture. He finds that same corrupt spirit exemplified in Browning's dramatic monologue of a Bishop ordering his tomb. Both writers relate the Christian "doctrine of imperfection" to Renaissance artists and scholars: those who demand perfection fail artistically and spiritually, but those who accept imperfection set an example of striving and accomplishment with heaven as their goal. In Romola, George Eliot follows Ruskin and Browning in portraying a corrupt Renaissance world, but illustrates her nineteenth-century Religion of Humanity with Renaissance types and characters. Walter Pater's The Renaissance revises Ruskin's critique of the Renaissance to present an aesthetic morality in portraits of artists and scholars, thus completing the transformation of the Renaissance from Christian to aesthetic moral symbol.