“Aestheticism”, which comes from a Greek word that means “to feel” (“to perceive” ), is the tendency to stress sensations as the primary source of art. This movement, appeared in England in the second half of the nineteenth century, can be considered the English branch of Symbolism and Decadence. In France the promoter of the movement are Théophile Gautier, with his promotion to Victor Cousin’s slogan “Art for Art’s Sake” , Baudelaire and Mallarmè; while in England the supporters are John Keats (with his cult of beauty), Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (with his poetry and painting as pursuit of beauty), William Morris (who fought factory-made objects in favour of handmade ones), Algernon Swinburne (who exalted the unmentionable eroticism) and Walter Pater, regarded as the high priest of the Aesthetic Movement. He’s also a sort of ascetic hedonist because he proclaims the idea of treating life itself “in the spirit of art” and the idea of life meant as a work of art. He doesn’t write to serve religion, morality, progress, popular favour or to express himself, but to serve beauty, following the laws of art, which say not to sacrifice sensations and experience. In this way art becomes the enjoyment of beauty, rejecting the moral or social function, and also the didactic aim, imposed to it by Victorian values.

This cultivation of the senses is extended to the abnormal and perverse by the decadents, who insist on the contrast between art and nature, but also on the strange, the unnatural and the grotesque. Associated to this movement is “The picture of Dorian Gray” of Oscar Wilde, the most famous personality of Aesthetic Movement. Thanks to him, but especially thanks to Aubrey Beardsley, the movement reaches its height in 1890s. Its end will be associate with the scandal of Oscar Wilde.