Consequently, sublime landscape painters, especially in the Romantic period, around 1800, tended to take subjects such as towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms, rough seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches that, if actually experienced, would be dangerous and even life-threatening. On the simplest level, a sublime experience while crossing the Alps is an engagement with landscape and in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the sublime was associated in particular with human responses to the immensity or turbulence of the natural world, as captured by landscape artists. Indeed, the sublime was, and remains, an important matter for visual artists on a number of levels, affecting artists’ choice of subject matter, the nature of the spectator’s response, ideas about artistic creativity as well as offering a yardstick for judging aesthetic excellence. Authors who used terms like these were seeking to define and differentiate the different kinds of beauty to which visual artists should aspire – ideal, picturesque, classical, sublime and so on. This is an interesting contrast with the historic past when sublime was a term that was used in art writing alongside adjectives such as ‘awful’, ‘dreadful’ and ‘terrible’, which today tend simply to denote ‘less than ideal’ but which in the 1700s were understood explicitly as expressions of awe, dread and terror, and were associated with the sublime as standard elements in aesthetic discourse. These days the word sublime is applied in everyday language to almost anything that can be refined to the highest point, such as a perfectly executed tennis shot or a delicious sauce on a dinner plate. This essay, and indeed the scholarship that it introduces, is intended to help readers see that this is an issue with two sides: we are seeking to recognise the motivations and devices that artists employed when they painted the sublime and also to understand the response that those devices were intended to elicit. Painters and other artists aspire to address the sublime in their art but, in addition, through their art they aim to create works that will have a sublime effect on the spectator. The sublime is not the only kind of unpaintable subject matter that painters engage with but it is a theme in the history of the visual arts that leads us to the heart of the imaginative process and it is a complex theme. It was at this point in the history of the word sublime that visual artists became deeply intrigued by the challenge of representing it, asking how can an artist paint the sensation that we experience when words fail or when we find ourselves beyond the limits of reason? The works of art that will be discussed in this introductory essay were conceived and executed in response to the challenge of painting the unpaintable. By the seventeenth century, the word in English was in use both as an adjective and as a noun (the sublime) with many shades of meaning but invariably referring to things that are raised aloft, set high up and exalted, whether they be buildings, ideas, people, language, style or other aspects of or responses to art and nature. This sense of striving or pushing upwards against an overbearing force is an important connotation for the word sublime and it is one that will often recur in this essay. Limen is also the word for ‘lintel’, the heavy wooden or stone beam that holds the weight of a wall up above a doorway or a window. It derives from a conjunction of two Latin terms, the preposition sub, meaning below or up to and the noun limen, meaning limit, boundary or threshold. The origins of the word in English are curious.
As we shall see, ‘the sublime’ is many things: a judgement, a feeling, a state of mind and a kind of response to art or nature. In addition, beyond academic circles, generations of artists, writers, poets and musicians have sought to evoke or respond to the term. Photo © The Trustees of the British MuseumThe word sublime is part of the discourse of philosophical aesthetics and literary criticism and for many centuries its meanings have been debated and contested.
0 kommentar(er)
