Aestheticism
WILDE'S LITERARY
Aestheticism is a very important literary present in European art in the second half of the 1800, and it is that phenomenon that sees "Beauty" as the only regulating principle of life.
The aesthete is the one who lives searching for beauty and who judges the reality that surrounds him through purely aesthetic parameters, despising what is ugly or not original.
He has an obsessive attraction to worldliness, to frivolous life, and wants to live an "inimitable life" often also marked by the scandal that arouses in others interest and controversy.
The greatest literary examples of aesthetes are Andrea Sperelli (protagonist of Piacere of D'annunzio) and Dorian Gray (protagonist of The picture of Dorian Gray of Oscar Wilde).
