A reference to the German humanist Conrad Celtis’s Ars Versificandi (1486) and to his “Ode to Apollo” occurs rather surprisingly in a short piece of fiction, “Duke Carl of Rosenmold”, published in 1887 by the English classics don, writer, and critic Walter Pater. This essay explores Pater’s “Duke Carl” as a Victorian caricature of Celtis and discusses potential sources for Pater’s late Victorian interest in Celtis, in his friend and collaborator, Albrecht Dürer, and their mutual cult of Apollo, the god of the arts and of light.