Imaginary Portraits

Complete and unabridged, with 48 full-page plates by Pieter de Hooch, Johannes Vermeer and Jan Vermeer van Haarlem. Four invented lives, each a study in what a mind does with beauty: a Watteau seen through a girl's diary, a Dutch philosopher, a German prince, a young Frenchman. Pater's conclusion to The Renaissance — that we should burn with a hard, gemlike flame — became the motto of the aesthete...