This essay addresses the reception of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) in the first decades of the twentieth century in the writings of Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, and T.S. Eliot. Pater’s acute sense of visual form in many ways points towards modernist art criticism, yet by 1910, when the Library Edition of Pater’s works was published, the author had obtained the status of a vampiric figure, ruling from the grave, against whom Fry, Berenson, and Eliot felt the need to react, each in different ways.