Henry Bacon

“Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was one of the key figures of decadentism. This turn-of-the-century trend was an outgrowth of romanticism and carried certain features to and past their breaking point. However, the word "decadent" can be used in two ways. One the one hand, it is a fairly neutral term referring to a certain postromantic trend in the arts running parallel and partly covering styles ranging from Pre-Raphaelitism to symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, and so on, and including artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Jovis Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé in France, Oscar Wilde and William butler Yeats in Britain, Gerhard Hauptmann and Stefan George in Germany, and D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello in Italy. Sometimes the term has been extended to included even Proust, Mann and James Joyce.

On the other hand, the word "decadence" has pejorative connotations. Thus works considered decadent can only too easily be considered to actually promote the excesses they depict in such loving detail. And true enough, at its most excessive , decadentism could lead to indulgence in shameless subjectivity and sensuality, a wallowing in the forbidden and the perverse, morbid interest in sickness and death, a flaunting of moral and social values, fierce antireligiousness and arrogant faith in the rights and possibilities of men supoosedly elect because of racial or cultural superiority and threatened only by undecipherable and pernicious women.

In any case, decadence in the arts obviously cannot be separated from its social context: bourgeois society heading toward a crisis at the turn of the century.”
― Henry Bacon, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay