Uncovering the vibrant contributions of aesthetes and amateurs to the emerging field of art history, Frankie Dytor explores how practitioners revived the newly fashionable art and culture of the Italian Renaissance. Delving into life-writing, performance, dance, photography, interior design, and dress, Dytor reveals how the decadent aesthetes envisioned their work as lived practice and scholarly endeavour. Focussing on these practices reveals a queer history of art, centred in creative, experimental, embodied research methods. Dytor explores how these methods came to be seen as unacceptably 'amateur' or 'literary', investigating who and what got left behind in the discipline's struggle for professionalization and scientific legitimacy. Based on extensive archival work and written in a lively style, this book includes a wealth of rarely discussed material and illustrations and will be of interest to students and researchers across a range of disciplines. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.