SOURCE: White, Richard. “Love, Beauty, and Death in Venice.” Philosophy and Literature 14, no. 1 (April 1990): 53-64.

In the following essay, White regards Death in Venice as a meditation on the themes of art, beauty, love, and death and argues that the novella can be read as a “powerful response to Plato and every other philosopher who has argued in favor of the redemptive power of art.”

Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice is a sustained and very powerful meditation upon the proper relations of art and beauty, eros and death. In particular, even though the story is set in what was then contemporary Venice, Mann emphasizes the perennial nature of the themes and issues that he considers by using imagery and allusion to evoke the mythical atmosphere of ancient Greece and by dwelling upon the classical parallels to Aschenbach's own obsession. Thus it is clearly the Socratic ideal of...