"The Masque of the Red Death": a relationship between art and nature

"The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.

But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

Some vintage furniture at grandpa

Aestheticism: an introduction

"Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life." -Oscar Wilde-

Historically aesthetes have been satirised and accused of exaggerated individualism and subjectivity, frivolity, elitism, extravagance, decadence, hedonism, homoerotism, vice and even masochism and sodomy. It has been linked to homosexuality, not only because of the implications of its principles, but also because of the personal sexual tastes of some of its adherents. In an era of rigid moral values, rationalism and industralization, these post romantics were seen as aliens within their society. Somehow they were not accepted neither by an upper class influenced by double moral standards nor by the masses, due to the elititst chatacter of the movement.