Quotation by Walter Pater

The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.
Walter Pater (1839–1894), British writer, educator. originally published in Westminster Review (Jan. 1867). "Winckelmann," p. 186, repr. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Macmillan (1873).
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