Renaissance tracks. Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, and Garden Aesthetics

This paper explores the fin de siècle reception of the Italian Renaissance by focusing on Vernon Lee's and Edith Wharton's interest in Italian gardens. In the paper I argue that such interest should be read in connection with the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and those nineteenth-century authors who looked into fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy not only as historians or art critics, but rather as classic cultural historians. They were intellectuals for whom the Italian Renaissance did not simply design a transition in the development of the human intellect, but represented a menaingful category to be studied in its political, artistic and historical development.