The Sublime from a historical point of view
(quoted from the Grove Online Dictionary of Art )Aesthetic concept, originating in Classical Greece, that was the subject of considerable philosophical debate in 18th-century Europe and that re-emerged in the late 20th century as a central factor in the study of aesthetics. The literary treatise On the Sublime (1st century ad), traditionally ascribed to Longinus, was a major influence on 18th-century writers on taste. In essence, Longinus defined the Sublime as differing from beauty and evoking more intense emotions by vastness, a quality that inspires awe. Whereas beauty may be found in the small, the smooth, the light and the everyday, the Sublime is vast, irregular, obscure and superhuman. The term entered 18th-century discourse by way of literary theory and criticism, such as Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) by John Dennis (1657–1734), and Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1711). It soon came to be applied to visual art by, among others, Jonathan Richardson sr in An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting etc (1719), in which he remarked that terror is a suitable subject for painters as ‘by consideration of our own safety it gives us pleasing ideas’. This concept, common to writers on the Sublime, was most fully expounded by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756). Burke distinguished between the Sublime and the Beautiful by identifying man’s leading passions as self-preservation and love of society. Self-preservation gave rise to delight, as a result of a diminution of pain or terror, while beauty was the source of ‘positive and independent’ pleasure. Thus delight might arise from the contemplation of a terrifying situation—natural, artistic or intellectual—that could not actually harm the spectator, except in the imagination; the resulting imagery produced an emotion more intense than that offered by beauty—‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’. Burke was thus rejecting established theories that affirmed that beauty was the result of proportion, utility or perfection.
Burke almost certainly influenced the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who first wrote on the subject in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764) and elaborated his views in further writings, culminating in the Critique of Judgement (1790). Kant differentiated between coarse feelings, directed towards the satisfaction of appetites, and the finer feelings required to appreciate both the Beautiful and the Sublime, which evoked enjoyment, but with horror. He further divided the Sublime into three categories, the terrifying, the noble and the splendid, epitomized respectively by great depths, great heights and great buildings. While largely agreeing with Burke’s definition of the aesthetic qualities of the Sublime as vastness, terror and obscurity, Kant rejected the idea that sublimity is inherent in the specific properties of objects and substituted the importance of the individual’s subjective capacity for feeling; the Sublime was thus not a universal property but an individual response. Kant furthermore linked the Sublime to morality, Sublime behaviour being the adoption and application of universal affection, a code of behaviour that depended on principles, rather than emotions. The physical properties, whether actually or imaginatively perceived, that were generally accorded to the Sublime by 18th-century writers, were vastness, obscurity and irregularity, all of which could evoke a degree of terror. Collectors in search of the Sublime found it in the banditti paintings of Salvator Rosa. It became fashionable to travel to wild and rugged places, such as the Alps, Snowdonia and the Lake District. The poet and essayist William Shenstone (1714–63) was among the first gardeners to put Burke’s theories into practice at Leasowes, his small estate near Halesowen. Richard Payne Knight, in The Landscape: A Didactic Poem (1794), and Uvedale Price, in his Essay on the Picturesque (1794), both advocated greater irregularity and wildness in landscape gardening. In architecture the Sublime was sought in the irregular Gothick style epitomized by Fonthill Abbey, which William Beckford designed in collaboration with the architect James Wyatt. Beckford also attempted Sublime effects in his Orientalist Gothick novel Vathek (1786), following a fashion set by Horace Walpole with The Castle of Otranto (1764), which owes much to contemporary theories of the Sublime.
Among the 18th-century artists who sought to express the Sublime in their works were James Barry, Henry Fuseli and John Hamilton Mortimer, who frequently chose to interpret subjects from Homer, Shakespeare and Milton, writers on vast and epic themes, and from Fingal (1762) and other poems that James Macpherson (1736–96) passed off as the work of the ancient Scottish bard Ossian. Painters of landscapes recorded natural phenomena: from the mid-1770s Joseph Wright of Derby produced many pictures of Vesuvius in Eruption (e.g. Derby, Mus. & A.G.), while Richard Wilson painted the Falls of Niagara (1774; see fig.) and Philippe de Loutherbourg invented the Eidophusikon, a miniature theatre with sound and lighting effects illustrating the sublimity of nature. Theories of the Sublime ceased to be widely discussed in the 19th century, but it remained a potent force in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, John Martin, Francis Danby and James Ward, whose Goredale Scar (for illustration see Ward, james) finely exemplifies the genre. On the Continent the Sublime is a recognizable element in the work of Delacroix, Géricault and Friedrich. In the USA the painters of the Hudson River school sought to express in terms of the Sublime the overwhelming magnificence of American scenery.
In the second half of the 20th century the Sublime again became a pivotal aspect of aesthetic studies; its stress on the importance of the imagination offered a way out of narrow aesthetic parameters. Kant’s theories, in particular, have been adapted to a number of different critical disciplines, including Post-Structuralism (in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan), psychoanalytical theory, Marxism and also Post-modernism, as expressed in influential articles by Jean-François Lyotard. Artists of the 20th century have sought to reinterpret the Sublime in terms of their own age; thus to Barnett Newman it became a term for the graphic expression of the horror of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the human condition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
S. H. Monk: The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-century England (New York, 1935, rev. 1960)
Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London, 1958)
Turner and the Sublime (exh. cat. by A. Wilton, Toronto, A.G.; New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A.; London, BM; 1980–81)
J. Lyotard: ‘The Sublime and the Avant-garde’, Artforum, xxii/4 (1984), pp. 36–43
P. Crowther: The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford, 1989)
T. Eagleton: The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London, 1990)
DAVID RODGERS
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from the Grove
Online Dictionary of Art
1011.98
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