Pater's graceful essays discuss the achievements of Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and other artists. It is a collection of beautifully written essays on various artistic movements of the Renaissance, and concludes with Pater's urgent call to readers to experience life as fully as possible. For Pater, Victorian sensibilities suppressed true enjoyment in life. His "art for art's sake" philosophy found in this work became the manifesto of the Aesthetic Movement.

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.

Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839—30 July 1894) was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction. He advocated art for art's sake. In 1873, he collected his papers on studies of representatives of The Renaissance in Studies in The History of the Renaissance (1873), renamed in the second and later editions The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.